[The year 2023 brings a new crop of 10 Ig Nobel prizes, each for a
piece of research chosen with the same simple criterion – that it
makes people laugh, then think. ]
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IG NOBEL PRIZES 2023: ROCK LICKING AND OTHER UNLIKELY WINNERS  
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Marc Abrahams
September 14, 2023
New Scientist
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_ The year 2023 brings a new crop of 10 Ig Nobel prizes, each for a
piece of research chosen with the same simple criterion – that it
makes people laugh, then think. _

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A question of taste

Jan Zalasiewicz at the University of Leicester, UK, won the chemistry
and geology Ig for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.
His essay “Eating fossils”, in The Palaeontological
Association’s newsletter, emphasises the simple practical
gain: “Wetting the surface allows fossil and mineral textures
to stand out sharply, rather than being lost in the blur of
intersecting micro-reflections and micro-refractions that come out of
a dry surface.”
[[link removed]] During the
ceremony, he acknowledged that, yes, sometimes it is also a matter of
taste.

A team based in France, the UK, Malaysia and Finland won the
literature prize “for studying the sensations people feel when they
repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many
times”. Their paper, called “The the the the induction of jamais
vu in the laboratory: Word alienation and semantic satiation”
[[link removed]], was published in the
journal Memory.

During the ceremony, Nobel laureates present Ig Nobel prizes to the
winners. Nobellian Al Roth told the team: “I have to say, I had
never seen a paper like this before, and I say congratulations and
congratulations and congratulations and congratulations.”

Spidery grip

Te Faye Yap, Daniel Preston and their colleagues at Rice University
in Texas won the mechanical engineering prize for reanimating dead
spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools
[[link removed]], thus pioneering a field for
which they invented the name: “necrobotics”.

In presenting them the prize, Barry Sharpless, who has two Nobel
prizes in chemistry, confessed he himself is terrified of spiders
because of a childhood encounter with tarantulas. He expressed
admiration for the necroboticists’ courage.

Seung-min Park won the public health prize for inventing the
Stanford Toilet [[link removed]], a device
that uses a variety of technologies – including a computer-vision
system for defecation analysis and an anal-print sensor paired with
an identification camera – to monitor and quickly analyse
the substances that humans excrete. During the ceremony, Park spoke
of his mixed hope and dread in trying to simultaneously diagnose
individual people’s health problems and protect their privacy (and
privates).

Going backwards

María José Torres-Prioris, Adolfo García and their team won the
communication prize for studying the mental activities of people who
are expert at speaking backwards. Their study “Neurocognitive
signatures of phonemic sequencing in expert backward speakers”
[[link removed]] focused on a community in
La Laguna, Spain, where some people grow up learning to speak
backwards as well as forwards.

The medicine prize went to Natasha Mesinkovska and her team at the
University of California, Irvine, for using cadavers as a means to
explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a
person’s two nostrils. Their surprisingly charming write-up
[[link removed]] in the _International Journal of
Dermatology_ says that the average nose hair count per nostril is
around 120 in the cadavers they examined.

This started out as an attempt to learn the medical significance,
if any, of there being hairs in one nostril but not the other in a
living individual with alopecia.

It’s electrifying

Experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking
straws can change the taste of food won the nutrition prize for Homei
Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura at Meiji University in Japan. They have
found ways, they report [[link removed]],
to make food taste saltier than it really is. This is a potential
health boon for people who like to dine on food that gains its
tastiness from being ultra-salty.

Katy Tam, Christian Chan and their colleagues won the education prize
for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students. Anyone
with sufficient interest can read details of that research in a pair
of studies: “Boredom begets boredom: An experience sampling study
on the impact of teacher boredom on student boredom and motivation”
[[link removed]] and “Whatever will bore, will
bore: The mere anticipation of boredom exacerbates its occurrence in
lectures” [[link removed]].

In 1969, Stanley Milgram – famous for his series of experiments
about “obedience to authority”, in which people seemed to obey
instructions to give electric shocks to strangers – performed a
more gentle experiment.

Milgram (who died in 1984) and two of his students – at least one
of whom, Leonard Bickman, is still alive – were awarded the
psychology prize for experiments
[[link removed]] on a New York City
street to see how many passers-by stopped to look upward when they
saw strangers looking upward. Bickman accepted the prize on behalf of
the entire trio.

Bieito Fernández Castro and his team won the physics prize
for measuring [[link removed]] the extent
to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of
anchovies.

The entire Ig Nobel ceremony was again, as in the first three pandemic
years, held online [[link removed]].

_Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony
and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier,
he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website
is improbable.com
[[link removed]]._

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