Studies on constipated scorpions, blind dates, and ice cream therapy are among the scientific work that won researchers the 2022 Ig Nobel Prize, where Ig stands for "ignoble". The 32nd Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony was conducted virtually on September 15, 2022 (September 16 in India). The researchers were honoured in 10 categories for their scientific work. Awarded annually since 1991, the Ig Nobel Prize is a satirical prize that celebrates ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. The bimonthly magazine Annals of Improbable Research confers these awards less than one month before the real Nobel prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden.
Why Is The Ig Nobel Prize Awarded?
The Ig Nobel Prize Awards are "honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK," according to the official website of Improbable Research. The objective behind the Awards is to "celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology".
The categories in which researchers were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize are Applied Cardiology, Literature, Biology, Medicine, Engineering, Art History, Physics, Peace, Economics, and Safety Engineering. This year, the Ig Nobel Committee did not award a Chemistry Prize. However, the Medicine Prize went to a chemotherapy-related discovery.
The Applied Cardiology Prize
Researchers from Czech Republic, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Sweden, and Aruba received this year's Applied Cardiology Prize. The researchers who received the prize are Eliska Prochazkova, Elio Sjak-Shie, Friederike Behrens, Daniel Lindh, and Mariska Kret. The team was led by researchers at Leiden University.
They received the Applied Cardiology Prize for their research on blind dates. The researchers sought and found evidence that when new romantic partners meet for the first time, and feel attracted to each other, their heart rates synchronise. Their study titled 'Physiological synchrony is associated with attraction in a blind date setting' was published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
The study states that a choreography of movements, physical reactions, and subtle expressions, together with physical features, may help promote attraction. The researchers measured the physiological dynamics between pairs of participants during real-life dating interactions outside the laboratory. The participants wore eye-tracking glasses with embedded cameras and devices to measure physiological signals including heart rate and skin conductance. The researchers observed that signals such as smiles, eye gaze, or laughter were not significantly associated with attraction; instead, attraction was predicted by synchrony in heart rate and skin conductance between partners.
The Literature Prize
The Literature Prize was awarded to Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica, and Edward Gibson for analysing what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand. Their study titled 'Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language' was published in the journal Cognition. The team is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Edinburgh.
The study states that contracts contain "startingly high" proportions of certain difficult-to-process features, including passive voice structures, and non-standard capitalisation. As a result, the excerpts containing these features are comprehended at lower rates than excerpts without these features, even for experienced readers. The authors concluded that poor writing, rather than a lack of specialised legal knowledge, is what makes legal documents difficult to understand.
The Biology Prize
Researchers from Brazil and Columbia received this year's Ig Nobel Prize in Biology. The researchers are Solimary García-Hernández and Glauco Machado. The team, which is from the University of São Paulo, received the award for studying whether and how constipation affects the mating prospects of scorpions.
The study titled "Short- and Long-Term Effects of an Extreme Case of Autotomy: Does 'Tail' Loss and Subsequent Constipation Decrease the Locomotor Performance of Male and Female Scorpions?" was published in the journal Interactive Zoology.
Some types of scorpions will jettison their tails to escape predators, the American Chemical Society says on its website. This defence mechanism is called autotomy. Since the tails do not grow back, the scorpions are no longer able to complete their digestive processes, and are constipated. After autotomy, critters lose nearly 25 per cent of their body mass, and the last portion of the digestive tract, including the anus. This prevents defecation and leads to constipation, the study states.
Though they can survive without their tails for several months, the constipation affects their ability to mate.
The study states that in the long-term experiment, autotomy had a negative effect on the maximum running speed of males, but not of females. This long-term decrease in the Locomotor performance of autotomised males may impair mate searching.
The Medicine Prize
The researchers who received the 2022 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine are Marcin Jasiński, Martyna Maciejewska, Michael Górka, Wieslaw Jędrzejczak, Anna Brodziak, Agnieszka Tomaszewska, Kamila Skwierawska, Grzegorz Basak, and Emilian Snarski. The team, from the Medical University at Warsaw, received the prize for the discovery that people taking the cancer drug melphalan reported that a common side effect of the treatment could be prevented if the patients slowly ate ice creams or popsicles during their melphalan infusions. The common side effect is irritation in the mouth, known as oral mucositis.
The researchers showed that when patients undergo some forms of toxic chemotherapy, they suffer fewer harmful side effects when ice cream replaces one traditional component of the procedure.
The study titled 'Ice-Cream Used as Cryotherapy During High-Dose Melphalan Conditioning Reduces Oral Mucositis After Autologous Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation' was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
One of the preventive strategies of oral mucositis is cryotherapy, which is the use of extreme cold to freeze and remove abnormal tissue. The researchers observed that commercially available ice cream can prevent oral mucositis during melphalan infusion, and could be used as a cost-effective, less burdensome, and easy to implement method in the prevention of oral mucositis.
The Engineering Prize
Researchers from the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan received this year's Engineering Prize. The researchers are Kazuo Ohuchi, Yoshiyuki Ueno, Gen Matsuzaki, Goro Imura, and Masaru Uehara.
Their study titled 'How to Use Fingers during Rotary Control of Columnar Knobs' was published in the journal Bulletin of Japanese Society for the Science of Design.
The team received the prize for trying to discover the most efficient way for people to use their fingers when turning a knob.
The Art History Prize
Researchers from the Netherlands, Guatemala, United States, and Austria won the 2022 Ig Nobel Prize in Art History. The researchers are Peter de Smet and Nicholas Hellmuth. Their study titled 'Multidisciplinary Approach to Ritual Enema Scenes on Ancient Maya Pottery' was published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology.
Enema is a procedure in which liquid or gas is injected into the rectum, to expel its contents or to introduce other materials. It helps stimulate the emptying of the bowel. Classic Maya Pottery has various enema scenes. These represent rituals and may indicate that ancient Maya took intoxicating enemas in a ritual context.
However, there is a traditional view that the ancient Maya did not indulge in ritual ecstasy. The finding made by the researchers suggests otherwise.
Some scenes suggest that the ancient Maya took a significant amount of alcoholic beverages rectally. The researchers concluded that an alcoholic liquid may certainly intensify a state of intoxication, when it is administered via the rectal route.
The Physics Prize
The 2022 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to two groups. The researchers are from China, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and the United States.
According to Improbable Research, Frank Fish, Zhi-Ming Yuan, Minglu Chen, Laibing Jia, Chunyan Ji, and Atilla Incecik received the Physics Prize for trying to understand how ducklings manage to swim in formation.
One of the team's work was published in the book Mechanics and Physiology of Animal Swimming. The other team's work was published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.
The team led by Frank Fish is from West Chester University, while the other team of researchers is from University of Strathclyde and Jiangsu University of Science and Technology.
According to the study published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, ducklings follow their mothers in a highly organised formation on open waters. Three questions arise, namely, why the ducklings are swimming in formation, what the best swimming formation is, and how much energy can be preserved by each individual in formation swimming.
The researchers observed two new and interesting findings in waterfowl — wave-riding and wave-passing. The mother duck generates waves, and the trailing duckling rides these waves.
The study states that a destructive wave interference phenomenon occurs when a duckling swims at a 'sweet point' behind its mother. This phenomenon turns the wave drag (a force that retards the movement of an object) of the duckling positive, pushing the bird forward.
The rest of the ducklings can also sustain the wave-riding benefit in a single-file formation. Thus, wave-riding and wave-passing are probably the principal reasons behind the evolution of swimming formation by waterfowl.
The study is the first to reveal the reasons why the formation movement of waterfowl can preserve individuals' energy expenditure, the authors note.
The Peace Prize
Researchers from China, Hungary, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Italy, Australia, Switzerland, and the United States won the 2022 Ig Nobel Prize in Peace. The international team received the award for "developing an algorithm to help gossipers decide when to tell the truth and when to lie".
The study titled 'Honesty and Dishonesty in Gossip Strategies: A Fitness Interdependence Analysis', was published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
The information transmitted through gossip can be biased, because gossipers may send dishonest information about others for personal gains, the study states. Reputation-based cooperation cannot evolve in the wake of such dishonest gossip.
Therefore, the researchers developed formal models to provide the theoretical foundation for individuals' gossip strategies.
The Economics Prize
Researchers Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda from the University of Catania in Italy won the 2022 Ig Nobel Prize in Economics "for explaining, mathematically, why success most often goes not to the most talented people, but instead to the luckiest".
The study 'titled' Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure' was published in the journal Advances in Complex Systems.
Many people believe that personal qualities such as talent, skills, smartness, efforts, willfulness, hard work, or risk taking lead to success. People often admit that a certain degree of luck could play a role in achieving significant success. The study states that as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. The authors note that some "hidden ingredient" is at work behind the scenes. They suggest that such an ingredient is just "randomness".
The authors show that if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by averagely talented but sensibly luckier individuals.
The study sheds new light on the effectiveness of assessing merit on the basis of the reached level of success and underlines the risks of distributing excessive honours or resources to people who, at the end of the day, could have simply been luckier than others.
The Safety Engineering Prize
Magnus Gens won the 2022 Ig Nobel Prize in Safety Engineering for designing a moose-like crash test dummy for his 2001 master's thesis at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.
Gens' thesis titled 'Moose Crash Test Dummy' states that car-moose collisions are a huge problem with many fatal outcomes. After thorough research work, a moose dummy was constructed to reduce the number of injuries caused by passenger cars colliding with a moose.
The main components of the test dummy are 116 rubber plates, along with steel parts holding the pieces together. Gens created a database containing all part details. He set the parameters in a way such that the location of the centre of gravity and shape were similar to those of a moose.
After the dummy was assembled, crash testing began. One of the vehicles to be tested was an old Volvo. The thesis states that the crash test results were very pleasing because the demolished cars looked very much like cars involved in real moose crashes. Several versions of Gens' dummy have been used in countless auto-safety tests in Sweden.
More About The Ig Nobel Prize Award 2022
Every September, the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony is held in Harvard University's Sanders Theatre. Nobel Laureates physically confer the Ig Nobel Prizes to researchers. For the last three years, the ceremony has been held in virtual mode. The theme of this year's ceremony was "knowledge".
The Nobel Laureates presented the Ig Nobel Prizes with the help of video trickery. In the official webcast, the Nobel Laureates can be seen handing the prize off screen, while the winners reached out and showed a prize they had been sent.
The Nobel Laureates who presented this year's Ig Nobel Prize Awards are Esther Duflo (2019 Nobel Prize in Economics), Frances Arnold (2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), Donna Strickland (2018 Nobel Prize in Physics), Marty Chalfie (2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), Eric Maskin (2007 Nobel Prize in Economics), Barry Sharpless (2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), Rich Roberts (1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) and Jerome Friedman (1990 Nobel Prize in Physics).