Crazy version of the real Nobel prizes, the Ig Nobel were handed over at the end of last week in relative indifference during a teleconference, Covid obliges.
And yet, the 2020 edition of this awards ceremony, which rewards the most eccentric studies and achievements, is not lacking in flavor.
Earthquake
How do high-frequency vibrations change the shape of earthworms?
For answering this crucial question, Ukrainians Ivan Maksymov and Andriy Pototsky were awarded the IgNobel in physics.
The study can be read here.
Big voice, big size
Is there a correlation between crocodile vocalizations and their body size?
By enclosing a crocodile in China in an airtight chamber filled with air enriched with helium (to increase the speed of sound), and by making it bellow, the zoologist Stephan Reber and his orchestra confirmed this hypothesis.
And got the Nobel Ig in acoustics.
The study can be read here.
Show me your eyebrows and I'll tell you who you are
You can identify narcissism in someone by the size of the eyebrows.
A very useful discovery in this "masked" period, which earned the Americans Miranda Giacomin and Nicholas Rule the IgNobel in psychology.
The study can be read here.
What is the height for an insect specialist?
Have a phobia of spiders!
And they are very numerous, according to a study by American entomologist Richard Vetter, who therefore studied his own colleagues.
As a reminder, insects have six legs and spiders eight, so these two legs would make all the difference.
At stake, the IgNobel entomology.
The study can be read here.
The phobia of people who make noise while eating ...
… Is a real illness, and it's called misophonia.
By studying 42 cases of people in great distress and in a state of “extreme aggression” in the face of chewing or lip-smacking noises, the Dutch Nienke Vulink, Damiaan Denys and the Belgian Arnoud van Loon won the cup in the category medicine.
The study can be read here.
A knife from m ... from
Legend has it that an Inuit skinned a dog with a knife made from frozen feces and saliva (bon appétit).
American anthropologists and archaeologists therefore tried to replicate the experiment.
Despite multiple attempts, they achieved nothing ... except to be awarded in the material science category.
Newsletter - Most of the news
Every morning, the news seen by Le Parisien
I'm registering
Your email address is collected by Le Parisien to enable you to receive our news and commercial offers.
Learn more
The study can be read here.
Do kisses on the mouth keep the economy going?
An international team has in any case tried to find a correlation between national income inequalities and the frequency of kisses on the mouth in the population.
Nobel Prize in economics, of course.
The study can be read here.
Why you shouldn't delegate too much
This incredible story had traveled the world.
Five Chinese hired killers were sentenced after they subcontracted an execution that finally fell apart.
A demonstration of the ineffectiveness of the delegation which earned them the Ig Nobel of management ...
Heads of State and the Covid ...
Covid requires, the committee had created a special category this year, medical education.
Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Alexander Lukashenko, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Poutine and Turkmen Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow have all won awards for teaching the world how much more influence politicians have as scientists about the life and death of their fellow citizens.
What about peace?
The Ig Nobel Peace Prize went - without much surprise to those who know the spirit of the house - to India and Pakistan for their entire work this year.
For the record, all the winners of these prizes, announced by real Nobel prizes, win a substantial sum in Zimbabwean dollars, a currency that is no longer short.
On the other hand, this year we would have liked to know the fate of an award-winning invention ten years ago in the midst of the influenza A pandemic: the bra convertible into a double mask ...
