They blinded them with strange science.
Scientists were given top “honors” for counting nose hairs and studying the sexual activity of anchovies at this year’s IG Nobel Prize, a parody of the Nobel Prize.
The light-hearted but clever annual ceremony, first held in 1991, recognizes the 10 most extraordinary or trivial achievements in scientific research worldwide.
Jan Zalasiewicz, a paleontologist from Poland, took home the prize for explaining why many scientists lick rocks.
“Rock licking is, of course, part of the arsenal of tried and tested techniques geologists and paleontologists use to help survive in the field,” Zalasiewicz wrote in the Palaeontological Society newsletter. “Wetting the surface allows fossil and mineral textures to stand out significantly, rather than being lost in the blur of micro-reflections and intersecting micro-refractions that come off a dry surface.”
Polish paleontologist Jan Zalasiewicz took home the prize for studying rock-licking.
A team of scientists won a prize for using a dead spider to create a tool.Getty Images/iStockphoto
A group of scientists from India, China, Malaysia and the United States won a prize for studying how to reuse dead spiders. Their team managed to turn a dead wolf spider into a gripping device.
“The useful properties of biotic materials, refined by nature over time, eliminate the need for artificial engineering of these materials, exemplified by our early ancestors wearing animal skins as clothing and building tools from bones,” they explained in Advanced Science , a scientific journal.
The event, now in its 33rd year, used to be held at Harvard University, but since the pandemic, has been pre-recorded and streamed online.
It is produced by Annals of Improbable Research magazine and sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Society and the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.
By Postal Wire
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
