For the fourth consecutive year, the Ig Nobel Prize Award Ceremony will be a fully online event, “due to the Covid-19 pandemic.” Apparently, the organizers still estimate the risk of infection with the coronavirus in the United States to be higher than here, where mass gatherings are again an everyday practice. So the traditional stage, the Sanders Theater on the campus of Harvard University, remains empty for the “Thirty-third First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony.”
The organization, as always led by Marc Abrahams, editor of the equally parodic scientific magazine Annals of Improbable Research never miss an opportunity to make corny jokes.
For the online ceremony, they came up with a goblet in the form of a PDF that could be sent electronically so that the prize winners could assemble it themselves. This way they could receive the prize remotely from only real Nobel Prize winners who had folded just such a paper cup.
Unlike the real Nobel Prize, a specific discovery is not rewarded, but rather remarkable articles published in the scientific literature.
This year ten won prizes. For example, the Communication Prize went to an international team that mapped the brain activity of test subjects who talked backwards. The Medicine Prize went to the morbid research of another international team that had inventoried whether the same number of nose hairs grew in both nostrils of twenty deceased people (ten men, ten women). Result: there is an approximately equal distribution with an average of 120 hairs per nostril.
Education Bored teachersBoredom is contagious. A bored teacher gets the audience he or she deserves. And bored students are less motivated. Although a lot of research has been done on bored students, little is known about teachers who have to drag themselves through class by their hair. Psychologists published about it in The British Journal of Educational Psychology
More than half of the students drag themselves through at least half of the lectures in the lowest state of arousal. It is known and obvious that boredom is a deactivating emotion, with a detrimental effect not only on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to learn, but also on learning performance. But what about teachers?
The researchers had 17 teachers and 437 students aged around 14 complete questionnaires for two weeks after classes. Expected outcome: When teachers are bored, or when students have the impression that the teacher is bored, they are less motivated to learn. Whether the teacher is really bored does not matter: surprisingly enough, students often estimate the teacher to be more bored than he or she himself or herself reported.
The question that left the researchers: what makes students think the teacher is bored? Attitude? Movement? What the researchers are not thinking about: many fifteen-year-olds probably cannot imagine that a teacher would enjoy something that almost puts them under anesthesia.
Another question that has not been answered: what about the interaction? Do bored students also cause boredom in teachers? How on earth do you manage to appear not bored as a teacher in front of a group of yawning, sleeping, texting, slumped students?
Martine Kamsma
Mechanical engineering The Necrobot Spider Why make a robot that imitates a spider, when you can use a real spider? The prize for mechanical engineering goes this year to American researchers who have taken bio-inspired designs very literally. They call Necrorobotics their new branch of robotics.
Spiders are inspiring to roboticists because they can move flexibly over all kinds of surfaces and have a lot of power in their legs. The mechanism in their legs is special. While mammals have pairs of muscles that make opposing movements, spider legs have only pulling muscles. They stretch with air pressure. That’s why dead spiders always have curled legs.
In this study, the researchers used “the intact body of an inanimate biological creature (a dead spider) as an off-the-shelf biotic actuator.” The biological creature in question was a wolf spider. He received a hollow needle in his abdomen where the connection of the legs is located, sealed airtight with a drop of glue. When air is forced through the needle, the legs separate. The necrobot spider can lift objects 1.3 times its body weight. After two days the gripper becomes unusable and the spider dries out.
The advantage of their ‘design’ is that this gripper is biodegradable, the researchers write. But is the ‘design’ also scalable?
Laura Wismans
Physics Mixing anchovies Wind, tides, the sun that heats the top layer of the water: all these factors can cause turbulence in surface water. But there is another way in which the water column can be ‘mixed’ in a vertical manner, according to Spanish and British scientists in Nature Geoscience : biomixing. With this phenomenon, animals create swirls in the water, allowing the various water layers to mix.
That sounds a bit abstract, and it was for a long time – which is why the researchers spent two weeks in the summer of 2018 on a research boat off the coast of Galicia in northwestern Spain, equipped with an instrument that can be read a thousand times per day. second measures the speed and temperature of the ocean water. Already during the first few nights they suddenly noticed a remarkable increase in ocean turbulence: it was ten to a hundred times greater than during the day.
It turned out that this was caused by large schools of spawning anchovies near the boat. The reproductive behavior of the fish therefore had a direct influence on the local turbulence. It is still unknown to what extent biomixing could also have an influence on a larger scale, for example on ocean circulation, but the researchers will be awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery.
Gemma Venhuizen
Literature Word alienation If you say a word often enough, at some point it loses its meaning. A study by neuropsychologists published in the journal Memory in 2020 uses word alienation to describe the phenomenon of a jamais-vu easier to understand. A jamais-vu is the experience that something well known to us suddenly appears as something unknown.
It can happen to you when you walk into a basically familiar space and suddenly get the feeling that you are there for the first time. Or you may suddenly be surprised by the spelling of a word. That you think: “Hey, this looks strange, is this spelling correct?”
Jamais-vu is often mentioned in literature in the same breath as the better known deja vu . The researchers wondered whether jamais-vu is also neurologically comparable to deja-vu.
The neuropsychologists asked students at the University of Leeds to write down words one hundred and twenty times. They found that students who experienced deja vu more often in daily life were also more likely to experience a strange feeling when repeatedly writing down the words. However, they saw no connection with old age and dissociative experiences, which is seen in deja vu.
Nikki Weststeijn
A version of this article also appeared in the September 15, 2023 newspaper.
