IGNOBELS 2021
Upside down rhinos, defensive beards and fat, corrupt politicians...
Awarded every year by the Annals of Improbable Research, the IgNobel Prize rewards research that makes people laugh, then think. Previous years have seen the prize go to papers that involved homosexual necrophilia in ducks, the physics of dripping teapots and showing Star Wars films to locusts,. The 2021 crop is no less startling and diverse.
Handed out by real Nobel laureates, although in an online ceremony thanks to Covid, this year’s IgNobels rewarded researchers from 24 countries on six continents. Winners of the 10 prizes included Commander John A Mulrennan (retired) of the US Navy, who received the entomology prize for eradicating cockroaches on submarines with a powerful organophosphate insecticide. The ecology prize went to researchers from Spain and Iran for a paper entitled “The Wasted Chewing Gum Bacteriome”, which used genetic analysis to identify the species of bacteria that grow on wads of chewing gum stuck to the pavement in various countries, while the transportation prize was won by an international consortium of researchers from Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Brazil, UK and the USA. They found that airlifting tranquillised rhinoceroses upside down is probably better than the current method of carrying them on their side in slings. The biology prize went to Dr Susanne Shötz of Lund University in Sweden for a series of papers on cat communication, looking at exactly what they (probably) mean by all the meows, purrs, trills, chirps, hisses, howls and growls they make. This research was particularly deserving of recognition as behavioural research on cats has a reputation for giving scientists nervous breakdowns.
Cem Bulut from Germany won the medicine prize for discovering that orgasm is at least as effective as commercially available
Orgasm is at least as effective as commercial decongestants
decongestants at clearing a blocked nose. After developing his hypothesis through “selfobservation” he recruited couples who were willing to use a device to measure their nasal airflow before sex, immediately after orgasm, and at a number of intervals afterwards, although he admits not everyone produced useable data, saying, “I think some people couldn’t focus on the device.” The chemistry prize went to research carried out by Professor Jonathan Williams on how odours released by cinema audiences change depending on what they are seeing on the screen, finding that they were different when people viewed comedy, suspense, or violence. It even proved possible to distinguish between different film age ratings by the levels of isoprene given off by the audience.
Research on beards won David Carrier the IgNobel peace prize. Carrier, a professor of biology at the University of Utah, got the prize for research that investigated whether men evolved beards to protect their faces in fist fights. This involved dropping weights onto a bonelike material covered in sheep fleece and led to the conclusion that hairy skin is a significantly better energy absorber than bare skin. He is now wondering whether beards may also act as obscurants, making it hard for an assailant to accurately target someone’s jaw.
The economics prize was won by Pavlo Blavatskyy from Montpellier Business School who used a computer algorithm on photos of politicians to find that there was a high correlation between obesity and national corruption.
The physics prize went to Alessandro Corbetta’s research, which explained why pedestrians don’t collide with each other, and the kinetics prize to work by Hisashi Murakami and colleagues that showed why sometimes they do.
Presenting the ceremony, Annals of Improbable Research editor Mark Abrahams concluded: “If you didn’t win an IgNobel tonight – and especially if you did – better luck next year.” Improbable.com, 10 Sept 2021, Guardian, 10 Sept 2021.