The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.
That's exactly what we need more of right?! As they say, the Ig Nobel ceremony is designed to first make you laugh, then make you think and I believe this is an important facet of education; humour. The research is out and related humour mixed in with education substantially increases learning and comprehension levels.
To get a real clue as to what this is all about, let's take a look at a few of last week's winners of 2017!
Physics: Liquid Cats
Inspired by internet pictures of cats fitting in boxes and jars, a French researcher went out to discover whether a cat is a solid or a liquid. And they were not messing around!
The study concludes that older, lazier felines are more liquid than young ones though there is a lot more to look into:
Standing questions include the potential implications of the rheology of cats on their righting reflex, and whether
the nonlinear self-sustaining mechanism for turbulence in pipe is applicable to streaks of tigers. Very recent experiments from Japan also suggest that we should not see cats as isolated fluid systems, but as able to transfer and absorb stresses from their environment.
Peace: Didgeridoo Lullaby
A whole team of researchers from all over the place (USA, Canada, Switzerland, The Netherlands...) have demonstrated that playing the didgeridoo on a regular basis as a form of sleep therapy actually decreases sleep apnoea and snoring.
This might be due to training of the muscles of the upper airways, which control airway dilation and wall stiffening
As you can see, there were definitely some positive results, something that could very much help advance positive airway pressure therapy for those severely affected.
Economics: Crocodilian Gambling Arousal
I couldn't make a sensible title for this one because it's just so bizarre in concept. It turns out that contact with a live crocodile intensifies that person's desire to gamble on electric gaming machines.
This study is a look into pathological gambling problems and physiosocial arousal, and they conclude:
...high arousal can intensify gambling in at-risk players, but only if this feeling state is not perceived as a negative emotion.
To be clear, arousal here isn't referring to a certain kind of attraction to crocs, but simply the emotion after holding a 1m prehistoric beast.
Anatomy: Why do old people have big ears?
The general belief seems to be that men's ears grow throughout their life for some reason, but not women's. As it turns out, ALL of our ears grow around 2mm a year after turning 30. We don't think of it with women because their ears start off smaller, and are typically hidden by longer hair.
Medicine: The Disgust of Cheese
I don't understand/like anybody who doesn't like cheese, so I'm glad that scientists have gone out of their way to find the neural basis of this cheese hatred.
Historically, studying aversion of food has been underwhelming, mostly because of the ethical issues related to deliberately making people sick from various food stuffs. This was a safe way to have a look into this under-researched area.
In short:
...our findings show that disgust for cheese, which may be the result from an initial physiological discomfort, is associated with modified activation of the mesocorticolimbic circuitry of reward.
Which basically means cheese haters have a modified (broken) dopamine reward system in their bodies that suppresses all the wrong things and turns them into cheese hating monsters.
Cognition: Twins
It turns out that twins can't even tell themselves apart!
There has been a lot of research on twins in general over the decades but very little when it comes to facial recognition. Might be important with the whole face-scanning smart phone movement that's about to explode thanks to Apple.
When tested, monozygotic (identical) twins could no better distinguish their face than from their twin. They would identify correctly about 50% of the time which is what you might expect from pure chance.
This puts to rest the now mythical idea that identical twins have a 'visual self-face recognition advantage', though there's a whole lot more to be learnt from their results.
Image Sources: Creative Commons CC0
So although the ig nobel is kind of a silly ceremony, it has real world applications. The prize money of 10 trillion Zimbabwe dollars (about enough to buy a loaf of bread) is testament to its silliness, but the arrival of real Nobel laureates handing out the prizes shows its thought provoking values. Can't wait until next year!
