Last night the Ig Nobel prizes were awarded to the most absurd investigations of the year. Thus, the Ig Nobel in Psychology went to the Dutch Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan and the researcher Tulio Guadalupe (Peru), for showing thatleaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower in Paris appear smaller. And for dedicating himself to studying the dynamics of the splash of a liquid to understandwhat happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee(and why it splashes), Russian Rouslan Krechetnikov and Hans Mayer, from the United States, were awarded the Ig Nobel in Fluid Dynamics.
For their part, the well-known ethologist Frans de Waal and the American Jennifer Pokorny won the Ig Nobel in Anatomy for demonstrating inAdvanced Science Letters whatchimpanzees can identify others of their species just by looking at photographs of their bottoms.
The Ig Nobel in Medicine went to a study published inWorld Journal of Gastroenterology, and carried out by the French Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti, in which recommendations were provided to the doctors who perform thecolonoscopiesin order tominimize the chances of your patients experiencing a “gas explosion”during the procedure.
The Ig Nobel in Physics went to American and British researchers who calculatedthe balance of forces that gives shape and movement to human hair when tied up in a ponytail. Russia’s SKN company won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for turning old Russian ammunition into diamonds, the Swede Johan Pettersson was awarded the Ig Nobel in Chemistry for finding out what made the hair of certain inhabitants of the city turn green by Anderslöv, and the Japanese Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada won the award in the field of Acoustics for inventingthe “SpeechJammer”, a device that interrupts the speech of a person -when it gets very heavy- making him hear his own words with a slight delay.
As for the Ig Nobel in Neurosciences, it went to Americans Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller and George Wolford for showing that brain researchers, using complicated instruments and simple statistics, candetect significant brain activity anywhere, even in dead salmon.
