The 2022 Ig Nobel Prizes are announced! Two awards were won by Chinese teams

At 6 p.m. on September 15, Eastern Time, the 32nd Ig Nobel Prize was announced. Due to the pandemic, the award has been presented online for three consecutive years. This year's prize is a PDF that needs to be printed by yourself, which can be folded into a strange paper box. The instructions say it can be used to hold the brain.

In addition, they will also receive Zimbabwean dollars with a face value of up to 10000000000000 , which is equivalent to RMB 0.18. However, because it is a collector's edition banknote that is no longer available on the market, its actual value is close to RMB 1,000.

Jean Berko Gleason, a psycholinguist at Boston University, gave the opening welcome speech. The old lady is 91 years old this year and has been the host of the "Ig Nobel Prize" for 15 years.

Well, let’s take a look at the 10 amazing research projects that won awards! Two of them are from Chinese teams!

Applied Cardiology Award

If two people fall in love with each other, will their heartbeats be synchronized?

When dating or going on blind dates, many people focus on feeling. What exactly is feeling? The award-winning researchers believe that it may be the synchronization of the heart rates of two people.

The researchers recruited 142 subjects at three large events, a music festival, an art exhibition, and a film festival in the Netherlands. They were taken to a small room. The two people who met sat at the two ends of a table with a plastic partition in the middle. The partition was first opened for three seconds to allow the two people to have a quick first impression. During the "blind date", the partition was opened twice, allowing the two people to have two minutes of verbal and non-verbal interaction. Finally, the researchers asked the two people to decide whether to meet again.

In the experiment, the probability of two-way running was 17%. The heartbeats of two subjects who were willing to see each other again increased or decreased at the same time. This is probably the feeling of heartbeat.

Literature Award

Is it intentional that the contract does not speak human language?

Legal contracts are known for their incomprehensible jargon and torturous sentence structure. The researchers analyzed a database of legal contracts and court documents from 2018 to 2020 and compared them to magazines, novels, and more.

They found that the biggest obstacle to understanding legal texts is not the technical concepts, but the poor sentence writing style. These articles always insert long clauses in the middle of sentences, which causes the key information of the main clause to be too far apart, making the sentences difficult to understand and remember.

This may also inspire ordinary people when writing - try to write short sentences when writing articles. If you are not good at writing, long sentences may cause your article to get bad reviews.

Biology Award

Before constipation kills you, you can still have a relationship

The scorpion Ananteris balzani, which lives in South America, adopts a survival strategy of cutting off its tail in order to survive when it encounters a predator. However, this is a huge sacrifice, because it loses its stinger, venom glands and anus at the same time, and often dies of constipation a few months later.

The researchers initially wanted to know whether tail removal would affect the scorpion's athletic ability. After studying 154 male and female scorpions, they found that the running speed of these scorpions with broken tails was not significantly affected, and they could still actively forage for food and escape predators. In addition, these constipated tail-breaking scorpions, both male and female, can find mates and give birth to offspring.

Medicine Prize :

Eating ice cream while undergoing chemotherapy can help reduce side effects

Patients receiving chemotherapy often experience oral mucositis, which is oral ulcers, increased saliva, and difficulty swallowing. This is because doctors usually need to pre-treat with high doses of chemotherapy drugs.

The first method that doctors thought of was to let patients hold borneol in their mouths. This can lower the oral temperature, constrict blood vessels, and reduce the amount of medicine that the mucosal tissue is exposed to. However, they later found that ice cream was much more effective than borneol.

In a study involving 74 patients, doctors prepared ice cream from the cafeteria in advance and told the patients to eat it slowly. As a result, only 28.85% of the patients who received ice cream cryotherapy developed oral mucositis, while 59% of the patients who did not receive cryotherapy developed oral mucositis.

Art History Award :

Ancient Maya Mysterious Rituals Painted on Pottery Pots

The ancient Maya people would paint court life, ball games, hunting and other daily life on pottery pots. In 1977, archaeologists discovered some unusual behavior - the people depicted on the pottery pots seemed to be giving themselves enemas. Is this also part of the daily life of the Maya?

The two authors of this year's Art History Award used more than 50 pages of detailed analysis of these enema scenes on ancient Mayan pottery in their 1986 paper, speculating on the operation method and its meaning. They believed that the Mayans did not perform enema to treat diseases, but to perform some kind of religious ceremony, and they might have poured fermented alcoholic beverages into their intestines.

Adhering to the scientific spirit of self-experimentation, one of the authors, Peter Desermot (who claims to be a non-smoker but drinks coffee and beer), challenged alcohol enema. He drank a total of 0.5 liters of 5% alcohol solution four times, and then tested it with a breathalyzer. The results proved that alcohol enema can also make people drunk...

Engineering Award :

How many fingers are most comfortable to use to turn the knob?

This 1999 Japanese study was mainly intended to provide reference for industrial design to make knobs more comfortable to use.

The researchers asked 32 students aged 19 to 20 to turn 45 knobs of different sizes, which were placed on a transparent acrylic plate for filming.

The researchers found that the thumb and index finger were used most frequently. As the knob became wider, the students involved in the test used additional fingers. When the knob diameter reached 10 mm to 11 mm, the number of fingers used to turn the knob increased from 2 to 3; when the diameter reached 23 mm to 26 mm, the number of fingers used increased to 4; and when the diameter reached 45 mm to 50 mm or more, all 5 fingers were used to turn the knob.

Physics Prize :

The ducklings line up to swim, saving effort because of the waves

As early as 1994, biologist Frank Fish was curious about a question: How do animals reduce their individual energy consumption when they move in groups? Ducklings swimming in a line is a good research topic. They can swim in the water 12 hours after hatching. The secret is that the mother duck reduces the resistance for the ducklings.

In 2021, researchers decided to take another look at Fish's research. Researchers from China, the United Kingdom, and Turkey answered this question. It is worth mentioning that the Chinese team is from Jiangsu University of Science and Technology.

This time, they used a mathematical model to calculate the benefits of ducklings swimming in a line. The researchers found that ducklings will instinctively ride the waves generated by their mother duck to reduce drag. The reduced drag will be transmitted to the back through the waves. Therefore, the ducklings that follow closely behind the mother duck benefit the most. The further back they are, the more effort they have to put in.

Peace Prize :

When do you tell the truth and when do you lie when gossiping?

We usually think that gossiping about others behind their backs is a bad behavior. However, the researchers who won the award this time believe that appropriate gossip is conducive to teamwork... So, when should we tell a little lie when we gossip? A research team from the Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science of the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences participated in answering this question.

In order to establish a mathematical model, the researchers designed three roles: the gossiper, the listener, and the gossiper. The listener and the gossiper will play a two-player game, and both parties can choose to cooperate or not to achieve different benefits. The person who spreads the gossip does not participate in the game, but can reveal the action information of the gossiper to the receiver to influence the outcome of the game.

The researchers found that if the relationship between the three parties is harmonious, it is best to be honest when gossiping; if the relationship is not so good, it is okay to be a little bit private when gossiping. As for whether the relationship is good or not, and to what extent, it is up to the gossiper to evaluate it himself.

Economics Prize :

Luck is really important if you want to succeed

The statisticians who won the prize this year said in their 2018 paper that individual talents are actually Gaussian distributed around the average. For example, the average IQ is 100, but no one has an IQ of 1,000 or even 10,000. Take working hours as an example. People work more or less than the average, but no one works a billion times as much as the average.

Yet why do people vary so much in wealth (usually a measure of success)? The eight richest men in the world have about the same amount of wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people. A big part of this is chance events, or luck.

For example, the researchers said that among the scholars who publish the same papers, the scholars whose surnames are ranked higher in the alphabetical order are more likely to obtain senior positions. People with easy-to-pronounce names are more popular than those with difficult names. Although success is inseparable from hard work, the element of luck seems to be not negligible.

To prove this theory, the researchers also created a computer model. They set up 1,000 dummies in the model with the same initial wealth. After 40 years of simulation, the results showed that the richest people were not the most talented, but ordinary people with good luck.

Safety Engineering Award

What if a car hits a moose?

There are hundreds of thousands of moose living in Sweden, and accidents involving moose and cars are common. It is reported that mother moose no longer care for their calves when they are one year old. These moose begin to fend for themselves and wander around freely. Traffic accidents are also likely to occur during this period.

Magnus, this year's winner of the Safety Engineering Award, built a fake moose model for car manufacturers to test. The model is made of rubber and steel wire and looks a bit abstract. It has no head and has long legs. Magnus said this is because the center of gravity of a moose is higher than the hood. When they are hit, the legs are hit first, and then the body rotates. After multiple vehicle crash tests, Magnus is very satisfied with his work. It is obviously strong and can be used repeatedly in experiments.

Comprehensive report by Chengshi Interactive reporter Jin Hongbin