The best (and also the non-best) science can make people laugh, then think, and every year the Ig Nobel prizes serve up some glittering specimens of this. The 32nd First Annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony â entirely online again, thanks to the pandemic â has given us this yearâs new winners and, as per tradition, Feedback regifts them to you.
Surfing ducklings
There is subtle mystery in the way ducklings manage to swim in formation. Frank Fish, who is a biologist and a human being, did experiments on this in the early 1990s. He deployed an artificial âmother duckâ in a flow tank, analysing the physics on display when real ducklings swam in the wake of that decoy. Fish concluded that vortices â the swirling of the water â explain much about the efficiency of swimming in formation.
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A quarter of a century later, hydrodynamicist Zhiming Yuan and his colleagues developed computer models of mother and baby ducks swimming together. Yuanâs group that âwave-ridingâ â surfing, essentially â reveals quite a lot about the physics. Fish and Yuanâs team were jointly awarded this yearâs Ig Nobel Physics prize. Together, they are a plum example of scientists finding different ways to analyse a phenomenon that is way more complex than it looks.
Those were baby mallards that Fish examined, the same species that ornithologist Kees Moeliker came across on 5 June 1995. The resulting publication, called âThe first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae)â, earned Moeliker the 2003 Ig Nobel Biology prize.
I should be so lucky
Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo and Andrea Rapisarda won the Ig Nobel Economics prize for explaining, mathematically, why success most often goes not to the most talented people, . Their study appeared in the journal Advances in Complex Systems. This was the second Ig Nobel awarded to Pluchino and Rapisarda. They and their colleague Cesare Garofalo won the 2010 Management prize for demonstrating mathematically that organisations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.
Two hearts become one
The Applied Cardiology prize went to Eliska Prochazkova, Mariska Kret and their colleagues for finding evidence that when future romantic partners meet for the first time, and feel attracted to each other, their heart rates synchronise. (Kret has a history of curiosity-driven research. She was lead author of a 2016 study called âGetting to the bottom of face processing. Species-specific inversion effects for faces and behinds in humans and chimpanzeesâ. That paper added humanity to the chimpanzees-only research that won the 2012 Ig Nobel Anatomy prize for Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny.)
Scandinavian noir
Magnus Gens created , wrote his masterâs thesis about it in 2001 and has now been rewarded with the Ig Nobel Safety Engineering prize. What drove Gens? His thesis explains: âScandinavia has a very large moose population and car-moose collision is a huge problem with many fatal outcomes.â
And the rest
Eric MartĂnez, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson won the Literature prize, for analysing . They published their analysis, a carefully phrased 7000 or so words, in the journal Cognition.
The Biology prize went to Solimary GarcĂa-HernĂĄndez and Glauco Machado. They studied and, if so, how. The scorpionsâ plight arises when they respond to a predatorâs attack by discarding their tail segments â an action called autotomy. GarcĂa-HernĂĄndez and Machado explain: âAfter autotomy, individuals lose nearly 25% of their body mass and the last portion of the digestive tract, including the anus, which prevents defecation and leads to constipation.â Despite which, love, or whatever you call it, finds a way.
The Medicine prize went to a team who found that when patients undergo some forms of toxic chemotherapy, they suffer fewer harmful side effects : sucking on ice cubes.
The Engineering prize honoured a methodical campaign to find the most efficient way for people to use their fingers when turning a knob. The winnersâ study, published in the Bulletin of Japanese Society for the Science of Design, . It is called âHow to use fingers during rotary control of columnar knobsâ.
The Art History prize celebrated the authors of a study called âA multidisciplinary approach to ritual enema scenes on ancient Maya potteryâ. Published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology in 1986, it is perhaps the .
And then there was the Peace prize, awarded to a group for their recent paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The team developed .
The ceremony ended with its usual salute: âIf you didnât win an Ig Nobel prize this year, and especially if you did, better luck next year!â
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