Well-timed, a few weeks before the serious Nobel Prize winners are announced in Stockholm, an organization in Boston traditionally presents the winners of the Ig Nobel Prizes.
It is an absurd and cheerful parody of the weighty circus in Sweden, with prizes for studies that first (can) make you laugh, and then also provoke deeper thought. The corniness predominates, which is also expressed in this year’s theme: ‘knowledge’. The award ceremony took place online in the night from Thursday to Friday.
Over the years, a remarkable number of Dutch scientists have been awarded Ig Nobel prizes. In 2022, the Dutch ‘medal harvest’ will be very large with no fewer than three laureates. Mariska Kret (Ig Nobel Prize for Applied Cardiology) for researching synchronous heartbeats of people during a blind date, Peter de Smet (Ig Nobel Prize for Art History) for researching the use of enemas in ancient Maya culture and Paul van Lange ( Ig Nobel for Peace), for investigating sincerity and insincerity during gossip.
Safety technology Crash test with moose dummyWhere does a moose have its center of gravity? How does he fall when hit – for example by a car? Many people will never have asked themselves this question, but for people in rural Sweden (and other areas where these kinds of animals roam) the answer is important. A collision with a car is life-threatening – for humans and animals.
In order to model the consequences of this, Magnus Gens, a Swedish engineering student, spent a lot of time at the Kolmården Zoo, measuring moose and studying their behavior. His goal was to build a moose crash test dummy.
But moose are not good models. Their size varies enormously and their weight also differs per season. The legs of moose are very long and thin and the animals are as flexible as if they have no joints. The moose model that was eventually used for the crash tests was the result of observations of two three-year-old male moose (these most often walk in the wild), literature study and information from the vet at Kolmården Zoo.
The animals were recreated from 36 rubber plates, wire and steel and then car accidents were simulated. “The test car was damaged in a very pleasant way,” reads a publication of the Swedish National Research Institute for Roads and Transport (VTI) from 2001. As it turned out: the center of gravity of adult moose is around the seventh rib at a height of about 1.35 meters.
Tanja Fieber
art history Enema at the Maya
Enemas on Maya drawings.
Photo The Met
Anyone who has ever mispronounced the name of the planet Uranus knows the American fascination with anal humor. This sector is therefore relatively often awarded Nobel Prizes, an American initiative. For example, a study of intestinal gas explosions during colonoscopy won in 2012 the same year that Frans de Waal was awarded an Ig Nobel for his research into buttock recognition in chimpanzees.
Now the Ig Nobel jury is turning its spotlight on enema use at the time of the classical Maya civilization, with the Ig Nobel award on a 1986 study by the later Dutch professor of quality of pharmaceutical patient care Peter de Smet (to whom, by the way, in 2017 a price mentioned). In 1986, together with the anthropologist Nicholas Hellmuth, De Smet substantiated that enemas depicted in classical Maya drawings could well have been used for the application of mind-altering drugs.
The general idea was that these enemas mainly played a role in ritual purification, but De Smet makes it clear that alcohol, tobacco and perhaps water lilies and toad poison may also have been used with them. A point of discussion was whether the specially shaped Mayan pots were not too big for such mind-expanding use, but, as De Smet assured in 1986: “In a recent self-experiment – after certain preparations – one of us could easily give a half-half enema. liter of alcoholic drink for a long time.”
Hendrik Spiering
Physics Surfing ducklings
Ducks swim behind their mother.
Photo Getty Images
Ducklings like to swim in a row after mother duck. It takes less energy than swimming next to her. 1994 confirmed Robert Fish of West Chester University answered this long-standing hypothesis by having chicks swim in a tank in which he could measure their metabolism. Measurements were taken when the chicks were 3 days, 7 days and 14 days old. The ducklings benefited from it at all ages, but most striking was the benefit in the three-day-old chicks, who, on average, consumed as much as 63 percent less energy when swam in formation in pairs compared to swimming alone.
But how come? About that arches Zhi-Ming Yuan and his colleagues at the University of Strathclyde in 2021 after Yuan’s daughter expressed her wonder at swimming ducks and the researcher found none of the googled explanations plausible. The ducklings ‘surf’ on the waves that the mother duck makes, they discovered. When the chick has the breast in the trough of the wave and the belly on the crest of the wave, it is propelled. The chicks pass the waves backwards, which does not cost them any extra energy. The first two ducks have a little more advantage than third and later ducks, but in theory a lot of ducks can ride the waves of mother duck this way.
Laura Wismans
Medicine Ice creams on prescription
Ice creams prevent inflammation in the mouth.
Photo Getty Images
Undergoing a stem cell transplant against, for example, blood cancer, that is horrific. Just because of the chemo treatment that precedes it. But for some patients in Warsaw there was a bright spot. Polish hematologist Emilian Snarski allowed them to eat a lot of ice cream while they were undergoing chemotherapy. For this sympathetic medical study He was awarded the Ibel Prize in Medicine on Thursday.
After high-dose chemotherapy with melphalan, the lining of the mouth often becomes inflamed, a nasty and painful side effect. Sometimes people can no longer eat because of this.
Cooling the oral cavity can sometimes prevent that inflammation. Adult patients are given ice cubes for this to suck up. But they often find it much too cold and as a result they stop cooling too early.
Children are often given ice creams during such treatment. Why not adults, Snarski wondered. To his amazement, this had never been investigated before.
While the melphalan was dripped into their veins, 52 of the 74 patients were allowed to eat three ice creams from the hospital restaurant. It could be ice cream on a stick or ice cream, everything was good. They had to eat it as slowly as possible and let each bite melt in the mouth. The remaining patients were not given ice. Among the ice eaters, 29 percent of the patients developed oral mucosal inflammation, in the group that did not receive ice, this was 59 percent. So it doesn’t work for everyone, but eating ice cream during chemo can prevent mucosal inflammation.
Niki Korteweg