What is the winning situation of the 2020 Ig Nobel Prize?

The annual Ig Nobel Prize recently announced the winners in 2020. Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, the award ceremony was held online. Awards include: Acoustics Award, Psychology Award, Peace Prize, Physics Award, Economics Award, Entomology Award, Medical Education Award and Medical Award as follows:

1, Acoustics Award

Reasons for winning: "Stephen Raber, Takeshi Nishimura, Judith Canis, Mark Robertson and tecumseh Fitch, they let a female Chinese alligator roar in a closed room filled with helium."

Crocodiles, alligators and similar non-bird reptiles are very good at making sounds and are easy to shout loudly, especially during mating season. Winners are curious whether these sounds may be a means to show their body shape (some studies show that females prefer to mate with males older than them).

To test this hypothesis, the researchers "recruited" an adult Chinese alligator at the Crocodile Farm Zoo in St. Augustine, Florida. After the medical procedure, the crocodile was isolated in a rectangular plastic bathtub. It is understood that this alligator often growls, usually in response to the roar of 40 American alligators in a nearby fence.

Therefore, researchers can make her scream at the right time by playing back the recorded bellows in two situations: breathing normal air or breathing air mixed with helium.

The purpose of this is not to tease the poor alligator. The author explained that this is a good way to observe whether these creatures exhibit vocal tract vibration (technically called * * * peak frequency), and mammals and birds use vocal tract vibration to judge their size. In fact, the authors do conclude that there is evidence of vocal tract vibration in their female crocodiles.

In addition, the author wrote in the paper of 20 15, "Because birds and crocodiles share a common ancestor with all dinosaurs, a better understanding of their vocal system may also provide a deeper understanding for extinct ancestors."

2. Psychology Award

Reason for winning the prize: "Miranda Giacomin and Nicholas Rule invented a method to identify narcissists by observing eyebrows."

In the eyes of psychologists, grandiose narcissism is a "dark" personality characteristic, which is manifested as selfishness, conceit, power and vanity. Although these people are usually attractive on the surface, some people can find narcissists almost at a glance-a valuable social skill that can prevent them from falling into the toxic network of narcissists.

Giacomin and Rule want to find out the mechanism behind this skill.

Previous research shows that when we meet new friends, a person's face is one of the first things we notice, so they recruited 39 college students, asked them to pose neutral expressions and take pictures, and then asked them to fill out the narcissistic personality scale.

Then Giacomin and Rule used these photos to conduct a series of studies, in which participants were asked to evaluate each face according to how narcissistic they thought the other person was.

Eyebrows are one of the most expressive features of the face. Researchers have found that people will accurately pick out exaggerated narcissists according to the particularity of eyebrows. It seems that the lesson here is to beware of those people with particularly thin eyebrows.

3. Peace Prize

Reason for winning the prize: "The Indian and Pakistani governments let their diplomats secretly ring each other's doorbell in the middle of the night and then run away before anyone has a chance to open the door."

India-Pakistan relations have been very tense, and the diplomatic departments of both countries seem to harass senior diplomats of hostile countries in a targeted manner. This includes cutting off water and electricity supply, tracking diplomatic vehicles, making harassing phone calls, and even running away after ringing diplomatic doorbell in the early hours of the morning.

4. Physics Prize

Reason for winning the prize: "Ivan Maksymov and Andriy Pototsky have determined what effect the high-frequency vibration of earthworms will have on the shape of live earthworms through experiments."

Vibrate a pool of water, and you will find that standing wave patterns will be formed on the surface when the critical frequency is exceeded. These are called Faraday waves, named after michael faraday, who studied this phenomenon in the first half of19th century.

Maksymov and Pototsky concluded that since many living things are mainly composed of liquids, they think that living things should experience standing waves, similar to droplets, under appropriate conditions.

The researchers chose earthworms as their experimental subjects because earthworms "have a hydrostatic skeleton, flexible skin and a body cavity filled with liquid." Earthworms are also very cheap, and ethical approval is not required to use them.

Fix these worms with ethanol, put them on a thin PTFE plate, and then vibrate the plate vertically. The researchers used laser vibration measurement to detect the vibration of live earthworms. Sure enough, the two recorded the key transition of Faraday wave.

According to the tradition of the famous "spherical cow" (a joke in the scientific community says that scientists assume that cows are spherical when giving farmers a report on improving the yield of dairy cows), Maksymov and Portotsky modeled the worm's body as an "elastic cylindrical shell filled with liquid" as a theoretical part of the research.

This paper also includes a sentence: "Large vibrations should also be avoided, because they will cause worms to eject viscous liquid." However, this project was not completed for fun. The authors believe that their research results "can be used to develop new technologies to detect and control biophysical processes in living bodies (such as the spread of nerve impulses)."

5. Economics Prize

Reasons for winning the prize: "Christopher Watkins, Juan david leon Gomez, Jenny Bovett, Agnieska Elanievich, Max kolb Mach, Marco Antonio Correa Varela, Anna Maria Fernandez, Danielle wagstaff and SarMiao La Borgen tried to quantify the relationship between national income inequality and the average number of mouth-to-mouth kisses in different countries."

These winners are keen to study the cultural differences of "romantic mouth-to-mouth kissing" to see if this behavior may be a means to maintain long-term partnership and other advantages.

Therefore, they recruited 3 109 participants from all over the world (spanning 6 continents 13 countries) to conduct online research. They found that kissing is usually more important later in a relationship, especially for young participants. As they assumed, the results showed that income inequality was positively correlated with kissing frequency.

The author concludes: "In countries where competition for resources may be more intense, people will kiss their partners more frequently, which may play an important role in maintaining long-term and stable partnerships in some harsh environments."

6. Entomology Award

Reason for winning the prize: "Richard Vetter, who collected evidence that many entomologists are afraid of spiders, and spiders are not insects."

Vettel is a retired assistant researcher and spider expert. He worked in the entomology department of the University of California, Riverside for 32 years. During the research, he found that many insect lovers hate spiders.

This is interesting, but Vetter does know the difference, because he pointed out in his 20 13 paper that two of the 4/kloc-0 entomologists who participated in his research were collection managers. "No matter how diverse the insects they face, their reactions to spiders and insects are different."

He later distinguished spiders from arthropods. He found the prevalence of arachnophobia among entomologists surprising, because they worked closely with many animals, which also disgusted non-entomologists. He wanted to know more about the possible causes of arachnophobia. He found that many insect lovers had been bitten by spiders and had nightmares.

In fact, he said, spiders are usually hairy, fast-moving and silent, and those creepy eyes scare entomologists. This study is worth reading because it contains rich and colorful personal details.

It also mentioned the "negative contact" with spiders in childhood: a person "often had nightmares (from 4 to 8 years old) and came across a human-sized spider web around her house, and was eaten after waking up."

7. Medical Education Award

Some world leaders, including US President Donald Trump, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Russian President Vladimir Putin, shared this year's Ig Nobel Prize for medical education for their attitudes towards the epidemic.

Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of incredible Research, the main sponsor of the campaign, said: "These people all think that their judgments are better than those who have been studying this issue all their lives, and they are more persistent about their judgments."

8. Medicine Award

A group of Dutch and Belgian researchers studied why people's chewing and other sounds make people crazy. Damiaan Denys and his colleagues created a new psychiatric diagnosis-phobia-and were disturbed by the noise made by others, so they won the Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Dennis is a professor and psychiatrist at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, specializing in patients with anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and impulsiveness. Her inspiration came from a former patient. She was so angry with people who sneezed that she wanted to kill them.

He said in an email: "I know a lot about obsessive-compulsive disorder, but these complaints do not conform to any existing clinical situation." It is also worth mentioning that Metin Allen, an assistant professor of anthropology at Kent State University in Ohio, USA, is also the co-director of the experimental archaeological laboratory of the university.

Since high school, he has been deeply attracted by the story of an Inuit in Canada. He made a knife out of his own feces. In order to know the truth of this legendary story, he used real human excrement frozen at MINUS 50 degrees Celsius to polish it into a sharp edge, and then tried to cut meat with it. "The poop knife failed miserably," he said in a telephone interview. "This absurd story has little empirical basis."

This study is a bit disgusting, but it brings up an important point: many claims are based on false or unconfirmed science. "The purpose of doing this is to show that the verification of evidence and facts is crucial," he said.