It’s time once again to talk about the annual Ig Nobel Prizes—a spoof of the Nobel Prizes that celebrates people who are advanced in the scientific field of getting someone to fund ridiculous studies. And every year we laugh. But a lot of people ask, “What’s the point of these studies? Are there any practical applications?”
Let’s see:
The prize for Fluid Dynamics this year went to Jiwon Han from Korea, for studying the movements of a cup of coffee.
We all have the same procedure for getting coffee: We pour it into a cup, and then we walk to our desks and gently set it down, and then we go back and get a paper towel and retrace our steps. Why does it always spill?
What Han figured out was that it’s kind of like when you’re pushing kid on a swing. You can keep pushing again and again at exactly the same strength, but every time you push, he’ll go slightly higher, until he goes over the top bar and kicks you in the back of the head. And your cup is the same way. When you walk, you sway back and forth at basically a fixed pattern, and with every step, the coffee splashes higher.
So Han figured out that to avoid spillage, you should try walking backwards. When you walk backwards, you don’t have a regular gait, because you’re constantly worried that you’re going to trip on something.
You should totally try this at work!
On the other hand, Han points out, you do have more of a chance of walking into someone else who’s carrying their coffee backwards.
Practical application: Carrying chicken soup on a Friday night.
Meanwhile, the prize for Medicine went to a team of scientists in France for studying the reason some people are disgusted by cheese.
It started when these scientists discovered that more people are disgusted by cheese than any other type of food. We don’t really notice that it’s so many people, because in our society, people usually express it as, “I don’t like milchigs.” And every time they say that, you can see a lone tear trickle down their spouse’s cheek.
So they did a study in which they took 30 people and stuck them in an MRI machine (one at a time, obviously) and hit them with various food smells (also one at a time). They used six control foods, including cucumbers, mushrooms and peanuts, and also six kinds of cheese, including gruyere, cheddar and blue cheese. The MRI machine was so the subjects couldn’t run away.
In the end, 37% of the subjects were disgusted by the cheese smell. (You would also be disgusted if you were trapped in an MRI machine with cheese.) Also, one guy had a severe reaction to the peanuts.
What the researchers discovered was that for people who liked cheese, smelling the cheese lit up a reward center of their brains. And for the people who didn’t like cheese, their reward centers lit up even more. So apparently, people enjoy not liking certain foods, which I guess you kind of already knew.
Practical application: How to force people to smell foods you think may have gone bad.
The prize for Economics this year went to two researchers in Australia for their attempts to prove their theory that casino-goers who are excited ahead of time will gamble more.
But how do you get people excited before gambling? You can say, “Hey, we’re going gambling!” but that’s not really exciting. People gamble because they have nothing else going on.
So, this being Australia, they decided to hand these people live crocodiles.
They basically plunked a small, three-foot crocodile—its mouth taped shut—into the arms of people about to gamble and watched what happened. What happened was that most of the avid gamblers decided to gamble more money than they otherwise would have.
Why not? They were already gambling that the tape would hold.
Basically, they found that “people with pre-existing gambling problems bet larger amounts, as long as they weren’t presently in a negative mood.” It’s hard to imagine what could have put them in a negative mood. If someone says, “I don’t really want to hold a crocodile,” it’s not because they’re in a negative mood.
I guess the next step is to figure out whether the subject will gamble even more if you increase the size of the crocodile.
Practical application: Dreidel.
Finally, the prize for Cognition went to a team of scientists who discovered that most identical twins cannot tell themselves apart.
“Wait, is that me over there? Hang on…”
And not just in situations where they don’t know they have a twin, but they each have half an amulet.
Sure, when you ask them, they seem to know which is which, but that’s because they have inside information. They look around the room, and all they see is their sibling. That’s kind of cheating.
But it turns out that visually, they’re just as clueless as everyone else. The researchers showed a bunch of people photos and had them guess which twin they were looking at, and the actual twins didn’t get the answer right any more than anyone else. It turns out that if you’re a twin, your parents have a lot of tricks to tell you apart, like different color yarmulkes, or they buy just one of you glasses, but you never develop any tricks. Your parents decided early on that they need a way to tell you guys apart after they once accidentally fed the same baby twice.
Practical application: Saving money on school pictures.
Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He also has six books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].
