The winners of this year’s IG Nobel Prizes included scientists who studied cadavers’ nose hair, anchovy sex, dead spiders and rock-licking.
They blinded them with wacky science.
Scientists were given top “honors” for counting nose hair and studying anchovies’ sexual activity at this year’sThe lighthearted but brainy annual ceremony, first held in 1991, recognizes theJan Zalasiewicz, a paleontologist from Poland, took home a prize for explaining why many scientists lick rocks.
“Licking the rock, of course, is part of the geologist’s and paleontologist’s armory of tried-and-much-tested techniques used to help survive in the field,” Zalasiewicz wrote in The Palaeontological Association newsletter. “Wetting the surface allows fossil and mineral textures to stand out sharply, rather than being lost in the blur of intersecting micro-reflections and micro-refractions that come out of a dry surface.
“The useful properties of biotic materials, refined by nature over time, eliminate the need to artificially engineer these materials, exemplified by our early ancestors wearing animal hides as clothing and constructing 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.
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