14 DAY TRIAL // The winners of this year's Ig Nobels were announced this past September 18 at Harvard University in the US, and some of them are probably hiding under their pillow and making plans to never again leave their house right about now.
Sure, the Ig Nobel Prizes are all about celebrating scientific achievements. The trouble is that this ceremony is all about honoring the silliest and perfectly useless discoveries, so it's understandable why scientists aren't exactly dying to win.
But enough talk. Let's see who the winners of this year's Ig Nobels were, maybe even poke some fun at them if they really and truly deserve it.
The Physics Prize
This prize was awarded to a team of scientists who studied and compared friction between a shoe sole and a linoleum floor both directly and with a banana skin standing in between. Simply put, they wanted to see what happens when we step on a banana.
Apparently, the researchers found that banana skins reduce friction between the shoe sole and the floor by about one-fifth, making the experience similar to walking on a well-lubricated surface. The bad news is that cartoons taught us this a long, long time ago.
The scientists who worked on this project and got to take home the Ig Nobel in Physics are named Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai.
The Neuroscience Prize
This year's Neuroscience Ig Nobel was awarded to a team of brainiacs who used science to explain why many people see faces where there aren't any to see. Thus, this study found that it's perfectly normal to see Jesus in toast, clouds and whatnot.
In their paper in the journal Cortex, the researchers, i.e. Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, explain that the human brain is hardwired to look for faces in the surrounding environment. This bizarre phenomenon is known as pareidolia.
The Psychology Prize
Apparently, people who stay up late are more psychopathic, more manipulative, and fonder of themselves than those who get up early in the morning. Or so say Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons in a paper that landed them this year's Ig Nobel Psychology Prize.
Whether these night owls spend their nights admiring themselves in a mirror and trying to devise a plan to take over the world and have all other folks worship them like gods remains a mystery. All things considered, it could be that they stay up late to watch movies and eat chocolate.
The Public Health Prize
Cats might be the kings and queens of the online world, but according to Jaroslav Flegr, Jan Havlíček, Jitka Hanušova-Lindova, David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan, and Lisa Seyfried (yes, there were a lot of scientists involved in this research), they are a hazard to our mental health.
Long story short, these researchers say that cat bites seem to make people depressed. What's more, it looks like these felines carry a parasite that can make folks more vulnerable to schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder and other similar disorders.
The Biology Prize
If you own a dog, you probably know that, before finally getting rid of last night's dinner, these life companions of ours must find the perfect place to turn into their toilet.
According to one team of researchers, what dogs actually do is try to get their body's axis aligned with the Earth's north-south geomagnetic lines.
That's right, these scientists say that, before they go potty, dogs try to achieve some mystical connection with the Earth. This mind-boggling research project was too carried out by a heck lot of scientists.
Here are their names: Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nováková, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladimír Hanzal, Miloš Ježek, Tomáš Kušta, Veronika Němcová, Jana Adámková, Kateřina Benediktová, Jaroslav Červený and Hynek Burda.
The Art Prize
Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea were the ones who were awarded this year's Ig Nobel Art Prize. The researchers were deemed worthy of this honor because of an investigation into how ugly paintings influence pain threshold in humans.
As part of their study, the researchers had volunteers look at both ugly and beautiful paintings while shooting them in the hand with a laser beam. Apparently, the people who took part in these experiments felt more pain when staring at ugly paintings than they did when looking at pretty ones.
The Economics Prize
The Italian government's National Institute of Statistics is the winner of the 2014 Ig Nobel Economics Prize. The Institute was granted this award after trying to increase the national economy by including revenue from all sorts of unlawful financial transactions.
By the looks of it, illegal drug sales, smuggling and the like were among the financial transactions that the Italian government's National Institute of Statistics tried to use to boost the national economy, as mandated by the European Union.
The Medicine Prize
Nosebleeds are by no means something to look forward to, unless you're really desperate to get out of a family dinner or a seemingly endless day at the office.
Luckily, specialists Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin found the perfect cure for them: cured salted pork. Apparently, these brainiacs actually used pork to treat a 4-year-old's uncontrollable nosebleeds, and the bizarre treatment more than did its job.
“Cured salted pork crafted as a nasal tampon and packed within the nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly, effectively,” the researchers write in their paper describing this peculiar treatment option for nosebleeds.
The Arctic Science Prize
The 2014 Ig Nobel Arctic Science Prize was handed to a team of researchers who took the time to study how reindeer react when coming face to face with humans wearing polar bear costumes. Not at all surprisingly, the reindeer made a run for it.
According to Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl, this indicates that, unless Santa is around to protect them, reindeer tend to be afraid of polar bears. “The ‘flight’ response and escape suggests a predator-prey relationship between the two beasts,” the scientists sum up their findings.
The Nutrition Prize
Raquel Rubio, Anna Jofré, Belén Martín, Teresa Aymerich, and Margarita Garriga took home the Nutrition Prize for a paper detailing how they made a fermented pork sausage using a strain of bacteria collected from baby poop as one of their ingredients.
It all sounds very yucky, but the paper documenting this weird research project has one really fancy name: “Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Feces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages.”
So, here they are. The proud winners of this year's Ig Nobel Prizes. One can only hope that next year's ceremony will be at least as entertaining as this one.