Reanimating dead spiders to use them as robot claws, licking rocks, backwards talking and a toilet that scans « anal-prints »: this year’s Ig Nobel prizes again put a spotlight on the quirky side of science.
Reanimating dead spiders to use them as robot claws, licking rocks, backwards talking and a toilet that scans « anal-prints »: this year’s Ig Nobel prizes again put a spotlight on the quirky side of science.
The 23rd edition of the annual awards, given out « for achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think », was broadcast in an online ceremony on Thursday evening US-time.
Real Nobel prize winners—some wearing silly hats—gave out the prizes and a $10 trillion bill in essentially worthless, inflation-ravaged Zimbabwean dollars.
Here are the 10 winners of this year’s Ig Nobels, which are produced by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.
The chemistry and geology Ig Nobel went to Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the UK’s University of Leicester, « for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks ».
Zalasiewicz told AFP he wrote his article « Eating Fossils » after discovering that « some 18th-century geologists used the taste of rocks to help identify them ». This is « a skill we’ve now mostly lost », he lamented.
The geologist, normally known for more serious work on defining the Anthropocene era, said he was honored to become an Ig Nobel laureate because the prizes « have become one of the grand traditions of science ».
