Winners of the Nobel Prize 2016

Thomas Tueites from Great Britain designed artificial limbs for mountain goats to take him for their own. For three days, the scientist lived in a herd, ate grass and rode over rocks, exploring the habits of wild animals. Snobel Prize 2016 in Biology

On September 22, 2016, the annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony took place . As usual, scientists receive this award for ridiculous, at first glance, scientific discoveries that "make you laugh first, and then think." This year, the winners received 10 trillion Zimbabwe dollars . By the way, the director of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, in 2009, won the Nobel Prize in Mathematics.

These discoveries are always funny, but this does not negate their practical significance. For example, the Danning-Kruger effect (winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize) explains a great deal in the formation of the social hierarchy of human society. Or take the Association of the Dead People of India . It protects the rights of unfortunate citizens, whom the authorities have issued to the dead in order to seize their property (Peace Prize 2003) is also a rather topical issue. In other years, awards have received research that the presence of people sexually excites ostriches; that black holes in their parameters are suitable as the location of hell; check urban legends about the rule of five seconds , etc. All this is real scientific work published in reputable journals. The Nobel Prize is also won by true Nobel laureates. For example, the Russian-British physicist Andrei Geim got her for researching the use of magnets for frog levitation.


The Snobel Prize in Boston was awarded (from left to right): Dudley Hershbach (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1986), Eric Maskin (Nobel Prize in Economics, 2007), Richard Roberts (Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1993) and Roy Glauber (Nobel Prize in Physics , 2005). Photo: AP Photo / Michael Dwyer
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This year was rich in interesting scientific discoveries . For example, a team of German scientists received an award for medicine for an incredible discovery: if it itches on the left side of the body, then the itch can be alleviated by looking in the mirror and scratching the corresponding place on the right side of the body, and vice versa (scientific article "Itch Relief by Mirror Scratching. A Psychophysical Study "published in the journal PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no 12, December 26, 2013, e82756).

Egyptian urologist Ahmed Shafiq received an award in the field of reproduction and reproduction, who thoroughly investigated how wearing 100% polyester pants, 100% cotton, 100% wool, and 50/50% cotton / wool affects the sex life of rats. It turned out that the rats that had been molested for six months with polyester underwear were much less active in sex. The scientist suggested that this may be due to electrostatic charge, which creates the material (scientific article "Effects of Different Types of Sexual Activity. Experimental study" published in the journal European Urology, vol. 24, no. 3, 1993, pp. 375-80).


Illustration from a scientific article by Ahmed Shafik

A group of scientists from New Zealand and the UK received the award for an amazing study of the “brand identity” on the example of ... stones. According to a survey of respondents, individual stones received specific "personality characteristics", depending on their appearance. For example, the respondent saw the stone as "a big businessman from New York, rich, calm, maybe a little suspicious." To another stone, one respondent assigned the characteristics of “a nomadic person, a traveler,” and another saw “a liberal, attractive young woman who used to work as a model, prefers organic products.” The study has undoubted practical value from the point of view of marketing, sales and branding of products (the scientific article "The Brand Personality Scale" was published in Marketing Theory, vol. 14, no. 4, 2014, pp 451-475).

The biology prize was shared by two Britons: Charles Foster, who led a natural life style at different times like a badger, otter, deer, fox and bird (as a badger the researcher ate worms and tried to sniff out wolves, as a city fox rummaged through garbage cans and slept in the courtyards); and his associate, Thomas Tueites, for inventing artificial limb extensions that allowed him to move over the hills in a herd of goats in the Swiss Alps, where he ate grass for three days, bleating and jumping over rocks. Both inquisitive minds have written books about their experiences (books "GoatMan; How I Took a Holiday from Being Human", Princeton Architectural Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1616891784054; " Being a Beast ", Profile Books, 2016, ISBN 978-178125555346) .


Thomas Thuites with artificial limbs

One day, Thomas Tueites almost got into a fight with other goats. “Well, you know, I just went to myself, chewed grass. He raised his head - and suddenly I saw that everyone else had stopped chewing, and some tension was growing around me that I had not noticed before. Then one or two goats with horns at the ready began to move around, obviously intending to gore me. I thought that fighting with them could not be avoided, ”he said in an interview with the BBC.

Scientists from Hungary, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland shared the physics prize for discoveries that white horses attract fewer insects, and also that dragonflies fatally attract black gravestones (scientific article “An Unexpected Adventure of the Horses”) a Depolarizing White Coat "published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol. 277 no. 1688, pp. June 2010, pp. 1643-1650; article" Ecological Traps for Dragonflies in a Cemetery: The Attraction of Sympetrum species (Odonata : Libellulidae) by Horizontally Polarizing Black Grave-Stones "published in the journal Freshwater Biology, vol. 52, vol. 9, September 2007, pp. 1700–9).

The psychology award was awarded to an international team of scientists from Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada and the United States for a large-scale survey of 1000 liars about how often they lied during their lives, how professionally they did it, how their skills improved over the years. It turned out that children are lying more and more as they grow up, reaching a peak for lies in adolescence. Adults lie on average twice a day, and the rate declines with age, with rare exceptions. Scientists also reasonably assumed that respondents could have lied during a survey (scientific article "From Junior to Pinocchio: A Cross-Sectional Lifespan Investigation of Deception" published in Acta Psychologica, vol. 160, 2015, pp. 58-68) .

The prize of the world was taken by philosophers from Canada and the USA for a scientific treatise called “On the perception and recognition of pseudo-profound nonsense”. Philosophers have studied how people perceive gibberish, which looks sensible, designed in the form of random grammatical sentences with clever words and pseudo-scientific terms. Such phrases are designed to hypnotize office workers or divert the attention of patients dentist. For example, these are phrases such as “wholeness, which by its silence surpasses the phenomenon of infinity” or “hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty”. Scientists believe that delusional statements are a real logical phenomenon that can be spread as never before in the modern era of ubiquitous communications and the Internet. As examples, they cite some tweets of famous personalities with millions of followers on Twitter. The question is how much people are able to recognize outrageous nonsense in the text (the scientific article "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit" was published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549– 563).

In all the Nobel Prize winners, the public launched paper airplanes.


The prize for literature went to Sweden, where the writer Fredrik Sjöberg lives. He wrote an autobiographical trilogy about his life, in which he learned the pleasure of collecting dead flies, as well as living flies ("The Fly Trap", the first volume of the autobiographical trilogy "En Flugsamlares Vag". Pantheon Books, 2015, ISBN 978-1101870150).

The chemistry prize was deservedly won by Volkswagen, which solved the problem of environmental pollution with an original automatic and electromechanical solution that reduced exhaust emissions during any measurement (EPA report, California Notify Volkswagen of Clean Air Violations) of the Environmental Protection Agency United States, September 18, 2015).

Finally, two Japanese researchers received a prize in the field of perception for studying how much the perception of size and distance to a subject changes, if you lean over and look at it in the gap between your legs (scientific article "Perceived size and Perceived Distance of Targets Viewed From Between the Legs: Evidence for Proprioceptive Theory ", Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, Vision Research, vol. 46, no. 23, November 2006, pp. 3961–76).