THE 2022 IG NOBLE PRIZES

The annual Ig Nobel Prizes were announced last week. These are the awards given to the most dubious scientific research projects of the past year. Some of this year’s winners:
– A study titled “A Multidisciplinary Approach to Ritual Enema Scenes on Ancient Maya Pottery.” It was based on a picture on a clay pot from the late classic Mayan period (600–900 CE) depicting the administration of an enema. One of the researchers, Peter de Smet, administered enemas on himself to see if this was a Mayan way of… oh, who knows? Professor de Smet gave himself an alcohol enema, a tobacco enema, but he skipped the one with toad poison. (* Then he said, “Hey, I’m not even a scientist. I just get off on this stuff.”)
– Research seeking and finding evidence that when new romantic partners meet for the first time and feel attracted to each other, “their heart rates synchronize.” (* Didn’t U2 prove this back in 1983?)
– A study analyzing “what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand.” They looked at phrases rendered in ALL CAPS; the frequency of archaic words such as ‘aforesaid,’ ‘herein,’ ‘to wit’ and whether legal jargon can be replaced by simpler terms without losing key nuances of meaning.
– A study of “how constipation affects the mating prospects of scorpions.” (* And now we know why scorpions are so mean.)
– A Swedish team of researchers that developed a moose crash test dummy. (* So THAT explains why that singer’s voice was so weird!)
– Research that discovered when cancer patients undergo some forms of toxic chemotherapy, they suffer fewer harmful side effects when given ice cream.
– A study trying to understand “why ducklings to swim in a row.” It found that ducklings instinctively tended to “ride the waves” generated by the mother duck to significantly reduce drag, therefore they create a line behind the mother ducker.
– A study that tried to explain mathematically why success most often goes not to the most talented people but instead to the luckiest. (* The focus of the study was Chris Pratt.)