Every year the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research awards the Ig Nobel, prizes thought to be a parody of the Nobel prizes in science that we all know.
This year’s winners are:
- Acoustics: Stephan Reber, Takeshi Nishimura, Judith Janisch, Mark Robertson, and Tecumseh Fitch for bellowing to a female Chinese alligator in an airtight chamber filled with helium-enriched air.
- Psychology: Miranda Giacomin and Nicholas Rule for creating a method to identify narcissists simply by examining their eyebrows.
- Peace: The governments of India and Pakistan for having their diplomats secretly knock on their doorbells in the middle of the night and then flee before anyone could get to the door.
- Physics: Ivan Maksymov and Andriy Pototsky for experimentally determining what happens to the shape of a live earthworm when the animal is vibrated at high frequency.
- Economy: Christopher Watkins, Juan David Leongómez, Jeanne Bovet, Agnieszka Żelaźniewicz, Max Korbmacher, Marco Antônio Corrêa Varella, Ana Maria Fernandez, Danielle Wagstaff and Samuela Bolgan for trying to quantify the relationship between the difference between the per capita income of the different countries and the average number of mouth-to-mouth kisses.
- Business management: Xi Guang-An, Mo Tian-Xiang, Yang Kang-Sheng, Yang Guang-Sheng and Ling Xian Si, five professional hitmen from Guangxi (China), who managed a murder for hire in an unusual way: after accepting the payment to execute the murder Xi Guang-An instead outsourced the task to Mo Tian-Xiang, who in turn outsourced it to Yang Kang-Sheng, who in turn outsourced it to Yang Guang-Sheng, who in turn It was outsourced by Ling Xian-Si, so each of them received less and less money to the point that finally the murder was not carried out for the ridiculous amount of the service. Of course: they were judged for it.
- Entomology: Richard Vette, for collecting evidence that many entomologists (scientists who study insects) are afraid of spiders, which are not insects.
- Medicine: Nienke Vulink, Damiaan Denys, and Arnoud van Loon for diagnosing a long-ignored medical condition: misophonia, the discomfort caused by hearing other people make sounds when chewing.
- Health education: Jair Bolsonaro from Brazil, Boris Johnson from the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi from India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador from Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko from Belarus, Donald Trump from the United States, Recep Tayyip Erdogan from Turkey, Vladimir Putin from Russia and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan for using the COVID-19 pandemic to show the world that scientists and doctors know no more than politicians.
- Materials Science: Metin Eren, Michelle Bebber, James Norris, Alyssa Perrone, Ashley Rutkoski, Michael Wilson, and Mary Ann Raghanti for showing that knives made from frozen human feces don’t work well.
