Looking forward to it, looking forward to it, at 6 o'clock this morning Beijing time, the 33rd first Nobel Prize will finally be announced! This is indeed a "copycat" Nobel Prize award. The winners' award-winning research often makes people laugh out loud at first glance, but it will make people think again when they look at it again - don't forget, many Ig Nobel Prize winners also won real Nobel Prizes many years later.
As a winner, you can receive
So without further ado, let’s take a look at what confusing behaviors this year’s scientists have!
Public Health Award: Toilet that monitors waste
In 2020, Dr. Seung-Min Park from Stanford University released the shocking "Stanford Toilet".
Not only can this toilet
Smart toilet, you can identify people by looking at chrysanthemums | Improbable Research
This toilet has been iteratively upgraded since its release. For example, researchers are also considering adding a heart rate sensor to the toilet seat to comprehensively detect human health indicators.
Use feces as a guide to know your health. I also hope that one day, while sitting on the toilet and thinking about life, we can complete a full physical examination.
Nutrition Award: Enhance taste with electrified chopsticks
Meiji University researchers have invented a pair of chopsticks that send electric current to the tongue, which is expected to help people
Licking chopsticks can enhance the saltiness of food | Miyashita Research Laboratory
This pair of chopsticks can enhance the perception of salty taste with weak electrical stimulation, and the current release process is controlled by a microcomputer fixed on the wrist.
Testing shows,
By the way, the professor who led this research, Miyashita Yoshiaki, has also invented a series of weird things such as a display screen that you can lick to taste, optical camouflage that you can eat, and so on. In comparison, electrified chopsticks seem quite serious.
Chemistry and Geology Prize: Why scientists love licking rocks
Although it sounds very strange, licking rocks is sometimes part of the job of geologists and paleontologists - and the winner Jan Zalasiewicz also explained why in the article.
Of course, since some ores are toxic to humans, non-professionals should not try it easily.
Medicine Prize: Counting Nose Hairs on Cadavers
People with alopecia areata may lose their hair, eyelashes, eyebrows and even nose hairs.
In order to better evaluate the impact of reduced nasal hair on patients with alopecia areata, it is necessary to know how many nose hairs a person should have under normal circumstances and their length.
To this end, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, conducted a cross-sectional study. They "recruited" 20 corpses (10 men, 10 women) from a medical school in Southern California, with an average age of 83.45 years old, and collected their demographics, causes of death, accompanying diseases and other information.
Subsequently, the researchers counted the nasal hairs in each nostril of the subjects and measured the length of the nasal hairs at three measurement points (upper, lower, and side of the nasal cavity) with a tape measure. The results show,
Mechanical Engineering Award: Using a Dead Spider as a Grasping Tool
This is the outrageous invention of Rice University engineers:
What did the spider do wrong...|RiceUniversity (animation accelerated)
Dead spiders can turn into robotic hands thanks to their unique way of controlling movement: unlike humans, they use
The researchers first froze the tarantula to death to obtain the spider carcass, then inserted a needle into its cephalothorax to allow the hydraulic system to connect to the outside world, and then used super glue to seal around the needle hole. Next, by injecting a small amount of air and changing the pressure, the dead spider's legs can be controlled to expand and contract.
Researchers even named this thing "Necrobotics" | RiceUniversity
The poor tarantula carcass can withstand 700 cycles of pressurization before performance(?) degrades. Researchers claim that this robot hand has the advantages of soft grip, biodegradability, and easy camouflage in the natural environment (??).
Psychology Award: When passers-by look up, do you follow suit?
If you see a passerby looking up, will you follow his gaze?
The researchers pre-set spectator groups of different sizes (1, 2, 3, 5, 10 and 15 people) on a busy street in New York. They stood on the street and stared at a window of the building across the street. Then observe whether the behavior of real passers-by changing when the number of people is different (it’s really a classic and boring fun).
turn out,
Physics Prize: Anchovies snap like a storm
When surface seawater and deep seawater mix, where does the energy come from? Most are driven by wind and tides, but researchers at the University of Southampton have discovered that anchovies' intense "snap-snap" can do the same!
In the summer of 2018, the research team measured coastal turbulence intensity on the northwest coast of the Iberian Peninsula for 15 consecutive days. They found that every day from dusk to dawn, even if there was no wind and waves, the signal of the acoustic detector was very strong. So they put down the small fishing net and found that all the fish that came up were fish eggs. It turned out that anchovies came here every night to hatch and fertilize their eggs.
The turbulence of biological churning has long been thought to be like using a needle to stir mayonnaise, and is not very efficient at mixing seawater. But this discovery shows that
Communication Award: What is a big brain?
The researchers invited two experts who spoke backwards.
Expert No. 1 awakened the ability to speak backwards at the age of 14. He would rearrange the letters of each word and pronounce it. For example, "banana" would be pronounced as "ananab". Expert No. 2 learned to speak backwards at the age of 8. He often speaks backwards in life, but he has never practiced it consciously.
Both men do have something special about their brains: No. 1’s hippocampus
Therefore, if a person has special functions, the first thing to consider is that the brain is abnormal.
Literary Award: How many times do you repeat it before you don’t recognize the word?
If you repeat a word too many times, will you no longer recognize the word? How many times will it be repeated?
The answer is
Researchers asked 120 subjects to write the word "the" continuously up to 60 times. Once they felt that the word was weird, they stopped immediately. As a result, 66 people (55.0%) had a strange feeling - they started not to recognize the word "the" after writing an average of 27.7 times. According to their description, at the end of writing, they "seemed to have lost control of the opponent" and "forgot what the word looked like".
In addition, the experimental results also show that
Education Award: Systematic study of boredom among teachers and students
It's really boring, don't watch it.
The ceremony ended with the famous conclusion:
GoodbyeGoodbye.
No Goodbye. We will meet again next year, the year after that, and many years from now to see what other tricks the lovely scientists have come up with, and how many of them have actually turned into Nobel Prizes.