Abstract:
The annual Ig Nobel Prize is here again, and real Nobel Prize winners are still invited to present the prizes. The prize is still a huge prize of 10 trillion, but unfortunately it is the Zimbabwean currency that has long been discontinued. I can only say that this is a familiar recipe and a familiar taste. But today’s Ig Nobel Prize has also undergone new changes. For the past 35 years, the award ceremony has been held in Massachusetts, USA, basically hosted by Harvard, MIT and Boston University in turn.
But this year, due to unpredictable political factors such as U.S. border inspections, the awards ceremony was held directly at the Parliament Building in Zurich, Switzerland.
The theme of this year’s conference is “Fungi”, so the winning research team will receive an incredible trophy: a 3D model that combines the characteristics of mushrooms and human feet.
No more beeps, let’s just draw the lottery and see what new tricks the scientists have come up with for us.
Let’s start with the Soil Science Award, which is very closely related to the theme of fungi. This award was awarded to a team from Switzerland and the Netherlands in recognition of their scientific research and artistic behavior of burying their underwear.
The Underpants team launched a citizen science campaign, first purchasing a batch of uniform specifications of 100% cotton underwear, and then sending it to more than 1,000 volunteers from 25 countries, asking them to bury the underpants in their gardens, farmland, public lawns and other places.
After 30 days/60 days, dig them out together with the torn pants and soil samples, and then send them back to the laboratory.
Although the behavior is weird, the scientific logic behind it is quite rigorous, because the component of 100% cotton pants is cellulose. To test the health of the soil, the traditional methods are metagenomic sequencing and enzyme activity measurement.
Now that it is underpants, you only need to look at the degree of decay of the underpants (cellulose). The faster it rots, the healthier the soil microecology will be.
For this reason, they also named this standard the "Pants" index.
The results are not as expected. Private gardens that have not been over-treated with chemical fertilizers and herbicides have significantly better pants index than public lawns that are subject to multiple attacks every day.
The winning team is also a master of organizing. They directly made the experimental subject, that is, the underpants into a team flag, and brought it to the awards stage without a care in the world.
After receiving the award, the research team not only handed out underpants to the entire audience, but also distributed one pair to the Nobel laureates present.
Tim Hunter, the 2001 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, also put on his award-winning underwear on the spot to avoid being disappointed.
The physics community is not to be left alone. Research teams from China, the United States, Canada and other countries successfully won this year's Ig Nobel Prize by designing a men's urinal that "will never splash urine".
Girls are not allowed to read the following part. Boys are best to read it carefully word for word.
Something girls may not know is that the men’s restroom is a bit like a magical world for all men, with several unsolved urban legends circulating:
For example, no matter how empty the men's restroom is, a row of urinals will always follow the principle of neighbor incompatibility, that is, if there is someone in position 1, the next boy who comes next will automatically avoid position 2 for convenience.
There is also the principle of absolutely prohibiting eye contact in the men's restroom. As soon as you enter the men's restroom, everyone seems to be automatically marked with a prohibition on eye contact. There are only three places where your eyes will land, the tiles in front of you and the toilet directly below.
And the civilized slogan that only boys can understand: One small step forward, one giant leap for civilization.
But when I was still young and strong, I always found it hard to understand that a small step forward did lead to a big step forward in civilization, but even if I tried my best, it would still happen that I would get wet when I took a small step forward.
In order to change this problem, the urinal research team used the Navier-Stokes equation and a high-frequency and high-speed camera to accurately calculate the Reynolds number and Weber number, and discovered a perfect critical phase transition phenomenon.
That is, as long as the angle of the jet hitting the toilet wall is less than 30 degrees, the kinetic energy inside the fluid will not be able to overcome the surface tension, and the sprayed liquid will be as smooth as a film, and will not splash at all.
Following this great research, they directly launched a urinal revolution and redesigned many new styles of urinals.
For example, a new type of toilet called "Nautilus" was designed based on the logarithmic spiral surface of the natural nautilus, which can reduce the splash rate by 85% to 95%.
The first one on the right is the Nautilus urinal
Honestly, it's really cool.
But is there really no team willing to improve domestic toilets?
If I change from O-shaped to U-shaped, I will no longer have to worry about nowhere to place my faucet every time I sit on the toilet.
Okay, now comes the part that is suitable for all ages. I believe that the girls have quickly passed the above awards, because the next chemistry award is to "persecute" everyone equally.
Needless to say, the fame of Guangdong Twin Ponytails is long gone. I also believe that many people have heard about the super high protein content of cockroaches, so in some disaster movies, cockroaches often become the last ration of mankind.
But now, scientists may want to give everyone a taste of the saltiness of cockroach milk in advance.
A multinational team discovered that there is a rare species of Pacific beetle cockroach in nature, which is relatively unconventional and carries out viviparous life.
When female cockroaches are giving birth to embryos, the mothers secrete an extremely nutritious cockroach milk.
In one operation, the researchers extracted natural protein crystals that are extremely difficult to cultivate from cockroach embryos. They used advanced X-ray diffraction technology to directly analyze the three-dimensional structure of this cockroach milk protein crystal at an extremely high atomic resolution of 1.2 angstroms.
It turns out that this thing is a very advanced energy bomb. Its unit energy density is actually more than three times that of the best milk in the world.
Let me just say that sooner or later humans will produce 10,000 kcal of food.
However, at present, scientists are mainly studying the structure of cockroach milk, but in the future, they do not rule out the creation of delicacies such as cockroach latte.
Of course, the real Nobel Prize winners who came to the scene were the ones who enjoyed the taste. The cockroach milk research team specially prepared several cups of milk for them to enjoy.
However, the host only said it was milk, and did not specify whether it was real milk or real cockroach milk.
But whenever you see Tim Hunter’s mask of pain, Shichao can only say, it tastes great, no need to say more!
Except for the above winners, none of the remaining studies are fuel-efficient.
For example, the biology prize was awarded to a few ruthless people who put on protective boots and repeatedly stepped on 75 venomous snakes and 40,000 feet.
It turns out that venomous snakes prefer to bite people during the day when the weather is hot, and compared to big snakes that look fierce, small snakes prefer to bite people. And, if you have a choice, you only need to avoid stepping on the snake's head and try to step on the snake's tail, and the risk of being bitten will be much smaller.
I'm going, didn't you tell me earlier?
Tonight we have to set out to find a big cobra and try its tail for depth.
The Medicine Award is more like the bottom-of-the-box research that has been uncovered. There is also a late Japanese scholar who won the award for studying nose blowing from an aerodynamic perspective as early as 1977.
Science has proven that in order to avoid otitis media caused by blowing your nose and blow your nose more efficiently, you must first take a deep breath and hold your breath, then press one nostril and blow hard on one side.
As an aside, you must know that this is the 20th consecutive year that Japanese scholars have won this award, so we might as well call it the Ig Nobel Prize Immortal.
The Economics Prize is a bit counter-intuitive. A research team from the United States, Canada and Mexico (friendly reminder, these three countries also hosted the World Cup together this year) found through research that the saying that the poor breeds treachery and the rich breeds conscience is wrong.
In their research, people with higher social classes are more likely to rationalize selfishness and greed into aggressiveness. Even if it is candy for children, they can take more.
The Peace Prize is even more troublesome. They found that although everyone likes good friends when making friends, they prefer their own friends who can play cricket together and even treat their enemies viciously. As the saying goes, hate is far more lasting than love.
Of course, I am talking about Americans and Indians, because the study sample is only from these two countries.
The rest is to study why kissing is spread in the animal world, and to cut off the mouthparts of female mosquitoes to make 3D printing nozzles. Parents like to smell babies, but they don’t like to smell teenagers. Both won this year’s Ig Nobel Prize.
So, after watching this year’s Ig Nobel Prize, it was a complete eye-opener.
It turns out that when top scientists go crazy, they are even more abstract than us who type on keyboards every day. While others spend their brains doing scientific research, they really spend their lives doing scientific research. Not only do you have to discover high-calorie cockroach milk, you also have to risk your life to step on the tip of a venomous snake's tail
I am used to seeing high-level scientific research in daily life, can there be more such funny Nobel prizes?
See you next year!
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