In a cross-linguistic study, Nick Enfield, from the University of Sydney and his colleagues Mark Dingemanse and Francisco Torreira, from Max Planck Institute for Pyscholinguistics in the Netherlands, sampled 31 languages and discovered all have a word with similar function and near-identical sound as the “huh” of the English language.
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If there was a “best effort” award among the group, it surely would go to Michael L. Smith, who had honey bees sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body to test which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip and penis shaft).
The Ig Nobel prize for Mathematics was awarded to Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer, who attempted to work out if Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, would have been able to father 888 children between 1697 and 1727.
Other researchers recognised at the Ig Nobels included those who looked into the effect of country music on suicides and experimented with Coca Cola as a spermicide.
Physics: The testing of the principle that most “mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds)”.
Bruno Grossi (R), walks like a dinosaur as he and his team accept the Ig Nobel Prize in Biology at the 25th First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes awards ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Ig Nobel for Physiology and Entomolgy was awarded to two scientists.
The freaky method of unboiling an egg cracked the top spot at this year’s Ig Nobel awards celebrating the silliest breakthroughs in the world of science. And then there’s the tradition of throwing paper airplanes at the stage.
“We are experts in kissing now”.
Among the other winners was Callum Ormonde of the University of Western Australia along with his team, who discovered a way to unboil an egg by using a device that folds proteins. You’re sneezing and wheezing and snot is just dribbling out. Who wouldn’t like to know this information?
Several award recipients chose to act out their research in lieu of giving a formal speech. Then, there were the researchers who figured out that driving someone with a stomach ache over a speed bump is a good way to find out if that person has appendicitis.
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Yes, it looks like a chicken with a plunger on its rear end, but the researchers concluded that its strut was “consistent with” how dinosaurs would have walked. They were painfully amusing . Original article on Live Science.
