2023 Ig Nobel Prizes.

[sjastro]

With the 2023 Nobel Prizes winners to be announced commencing from Oct 2nd, the Ig-Nobel Prize winners were revealed in September.

THE 2023 IG NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS

• CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE: Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.
• LITERATURE PRIZE: Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O’Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.
• MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE: Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.
• PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies — including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal-print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link — to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete.
• COMMUNICATION PRIZE: María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.
• MEDICINE PRIZE: Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils.
• NUTRITION PRIZE: Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.
• EDUCATION PRIZE: Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.
• PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.
• PHYSICS PRIZE: Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.

Fun fact Andre Geim won the 2018 Nobel prize in physics "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene" and the 2000 Ig-Nobel prize for investigating the magnetic properties of water scaling by levitating small frogs with magnets.

 

[Occams Barber]

With the 2023 Nobel Prizes winners to be announced commencing from Oct 2nd, the Ig-Nobel Prize winners were revealed in September.

THE 2023 IG NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS

• CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE: Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.
• LITERATURE PRIZE: Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O’Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.
• MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE: Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.
• PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies — including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal-print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link — to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete.
• COMMUNICATION PRIZE: María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.
• MEDICINE PRIZE: Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils.
• NUTRITION PRIZE: Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.
• EDUCATION PRIZE: Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.
• PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.
• PHYSICS PRIZE: Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.

Fun fact Andre Geim won the 2018 Nobel prize in physics "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene" and the 2000 Ig-Nobel prize for investigating the magnetic properties of water scaling by levitating small frogs with magnets.

And they say scientists aren't serious...

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.

??????? I recall Stanley Milgram from my Psychology lectures. He was famous for experiments showing how easy it was to induce obedience in human subjects (think Holocaust scenario). The problem is ... he died in 1984. How could he win an Ig Nobel in 2023?

OB

 

[sjastro]

And they say scientists aren't serious...



??????? I recall Stanley Milgram from my Psychology lectures. He was famous for experiments showing how easy it was to induce obedience in human subjects (think Holocaust scenario). The problem is ... he died in 1984. How could he win an Ig Nobel in 2023?

OB

Maybe he was used as a prototype before scientists transformed dead spiders into robotic grippers.

2023 Ig Nobel Prize for Gripping Work on Dead Spiders

Rice University researchers claimed the Ig Nobel Prize for upleveling biorobotics by transforming deceased spiders into robotic grippers.

www.the-scientist.com

 

[Occams Barber]

Maybe he was used as a prototype before scientists transformed dead spiders into robotic grippers.

2023 Ig Nobel Prize for Gripping Work on Dead Spiders

Rice University researchers claimed the Ig Nobel Prize for upleveling biorobotics by transforming deceased spiders into robotic grippers.

www.the-scientist.com

There's a video of the dead spider grippers in action in this link - a thing of nightmares for the arachnophobes out there.
(Scroll down to Mechanical Engineering Prize)

Meet the winners of the 2023 Ig Nobel Prizes

The award ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures.

arstechnica.com

OB

 

[AV1611VET]

What was the Ig prize for 2006?

 

[sjastro]

What was the Ig prize for 2006?

One of the protagonists was named in Time's 100 most influential people in 2006.
Asteroid 11714 was named in his honour.
In 2007 he received Caltech's annual Feynman Prize, Caltech's most prestigious teaching honor.
In 2012 he was awarded the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics.

He wrote a book to explain to ignorant creationists why Pluto needed to be reclassified.

​

 

[Occams Barber]

What was the Ig prize for 2006?

Do you mean who got an Ig in 2006?

2006​

The ceremony took place on 5 October 2006.

• Acoustics: D. Lynn Halpern of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, and Brandeis University, and Northwestern University, Randolph Blake of Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University and James Hillenbrand of Western Michigan University and Northwestern University for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping chalkboard(Misophonia).[106]
• Biology: Bart Knols of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands, and of the National Institute for Medical Research / Ifakara Health Institute, Tanzania, and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, Austria; and Ruurd de Jong of Wageningen Agricultural University, and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.[107]
• Chemistry: Antonio Mulet, José Javier Benedito and José Bon of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, and Carmen Rosselló of the University of Illes Balears, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, for their study "Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature".[108]
• Literature: Daniel M. Oppenheimer of Princeton University for his report "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly".[109]
• Mathematics: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, for calculating the number of photographs that must be taken to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.[110]
• Medicine: Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage";[111]
• Nutrition: Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.[112]
• Ornithology: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California, Davis, and Philip R.A. May of the University of California, Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.[113]
• Peace: Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant – a device that makes annoying high-pitched noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults; and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but probably not to their teachers.
• Physics: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, for their analysis that explains why uncooked spaghetti breaks into several pieces when it is bent.[114]