鈥淓verybody has won, and all must have prizes.鈥� Feedback subscribes fully to the Dodo鈥檚 verdict on the Caucus race in Alice鈥檚 Adventures in Wonderland. Equally, however, some have won more than others, and they must have further prizes.
From this angle, we approach, gingerly, the scientific world鈥檚 top looking-glass awards, the Ig Nobels. Now in their 30th year, the prizes for 鈥渁chievements that first make people laugh, and then think鈥� were announced last week in a ceremony all the more glittering for being held entirely in the pixels of the internet.
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Feedback attended the virtual red carpet, slightly faded and bearing a couple of nasty stains (the carpet, that is).
Bite worse than bark
This year鈥檚 acoustics prize was awarded for inducing a female Chinese alligator to bellow in an airtight chamber filled with helium-enriched air. , notes the team from Austria, Japan and an alligator farm in Florida, deftly sidestepping the scaly question of how one accurately defines a reptile.
There remains, however, the delicate matter of what the loud bellows they produce, which are particularly frequent during the mating season, are for. Is their purpose 鈥� and we hesitate to say the word 鈥� sexual in any way?
By demonstrating the presence of 鈥渇ormant鈥� frequencies created by the shape of the vocal tract, which are increased by breathing helium, the researchers suggest yes: the calls may advertise an appropriate body size to potential mates.
Feedback applauds the integrity of those behind the work, who return triumphantly with these new insights from the crocodilian interior. Simultaneously, we surreptitiously add an entry to 鈥渕ating and dating strategies鈥� in the relevant place in our extensive piling system.
Kiss 鈥榥鈥� tell
Speaking of which, the economics prize went to a group of researchers from Australia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, France, Poland and the UK for trying to quantify the relationship between .
They found that the two were locked in a passionate embrace: the higher a nation鈥檚 Gini coefficient, a measure of economic inequality, the higher its self-reported kissing frequency. Team member Christopher
Watkins was unsurprised by the result, as all sorts of research points to a committed partner being seen as more important when resources are tight. Nevertheless, certain facets of the work puzzle Feedback, such as the fervour with which the frigid but unequal British apparently kiss compared with the French, whose 茅galit茅 seems to exceed both their libert茅 and their fraternit茅. All in all, though, we can only recommend the allaying of mutual economic insecurity as an excuse for anyone caught in flagrante.
Nails on board
The award for medicine went to a team at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands for adding a new term to the manual of psychiatric conditions: misophonia, or an impulsive and aggressive response to annoying sounds made by fellow humans. Team member Damiaan Denys was first moved to propose it after treating someone who became aggressive whenever she heard someone sneeze. 鈥淚t was spring and I suffer from hay fever, so I was very tense during the diagnostic interview,鈥� he says.
A less extreme version of getting annoyed by annoying sounds, and the possibly annoying people who make them, is a human near-universal. So, at least, Feedback鈥檚 banishment to the stationery cupboard would suggest. Denys and his colleagues have since developed a therapy programme that involves mixing annoying sounds with ones that evoke pleasant responses, which has a success rate in soothing frayed nerves of over 50聽per cent. Our colleagues should please note.
The worm turned
What happens to an ? The answer, according to the recipients of this year鈥檚 physics prize, is that its entire body adopts a standing wave form known as a Faraday wave.
Ivan Maksymov and Andriy Pototsky at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne note that this happens because 鈥渋t is plausible to consider the worm to聽be a liquid drop enclosed by a聽thin elastic skin鈥�.
Feedback applauds this significant step closer to that holy聽grail of physics, a model organism that actually conforms to equations. Move over, spherical聽cows in a vacuum.
The eyebrows have it
Finally, visibly moved by her success is Miranda Giacomin at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada. She and Nicholas Rule at the University of Toronto won the psychology award for devising a method to .
The research was very data-driven, she explains: they looked for facial cues that seemed to predict narcissism and, 鈥渁fter systematically breaking down the components of the face, the data led us to the eyebrows鈥�, she says.
Feedback makes no comment, and merely raises one of our distinct, shapely and quite frankly glorious pair. More Ig Nobels the same time next year, possibly.
