2023 IG NOBEL AWARDS

It’s time again for the annual Ig Nobel Awards, awards to dubious achievements in science. Here are some of the more questionable scientific studies from the past year:
– Jan Zalasiewicz, a paleontologist at the University of Leicester in the UK, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks. His conclusion: “Wetting the surface allows fossil and mineral textures to stand out sharply rather than being lost in the blur of intersecting micro-reflections and micro-refractions that come out of a dry surface.”
– Grad students at Rice University, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools. They transformed a dead wolf spider into a gripping tool that was able to pick up… another dead wolf spider. (* How about studying what’s killing all the wolf spiders?)
– Researchers at the University of California at Irvine, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils. The results: The average nose hair count per nostril is between 120 and 122 hairs. (* That’s a range of only 1.6%. Why split hairs?)
– A team of Spanish researchers for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.
– Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete. (* Obviously, the crappiest entry.)
– A pair of Japanese researchers for their experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food. (* I’m shocked they got the money for this.)
– A team from the University of Hong Kong, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students. (* Physician, heal thyself!)
– Leonard Bickman and Lawrence Berkowitz, for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward. They found that if just one person was looking up, just 4 percent of passersby would stop and also look up, compared to 40 percent who stopped when 15 people were looking up.
– Five researchers from the University of Leeds, for studying the sensations people feel “when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.”
* Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. I feel superior. Stuperior, as it were.
* They award these in September, then in October come the real Nobel Prizes, making these people seem even stupider. Kind of mean.