A group of researchers who “spoke the alligator with a voice” and psychologists who identified narcissism by the eyebrows also won one of the IgNobel prizes, also known as a parody of the Nobel Prize.

Stephen Reber and his colleagues performed the well-known party trick, when you start talking in a funny voice when inhaling helium, with alligators to learn how the reptile communicates. The research was carried out on the basis of serious scientific criteria, and the award was awarded for the comic method of the subject.

This year’s ten “awards” were awarded on Thursday Annals of improbable investigations in the organization of a magazine of scientific humor. However, if you dig a little deeper into comical-sounding topics, you can see that the research was actually done to solve existing problems and was published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Reber et al., For example, have tried to show that crocodiles and other reptiles can make their body size obvious by sounding, just as the cries of mammals and birds are suitable for this.

“If the animal is larger, its voice is lower because the space in which the sound-producing organs vibrate is wider. We did not know if this phenomenon existed in reptiles, but not in frogs or amphibians, for example, ”explained Stephen Reber.

The experiment was performed by placing the crocodile in a container filled with air or heliox (a mixture of helium and oxygen). The vibration of the vocal cords does not change in any case, only the sound emitted by the animal, since its speed varies in the different gas mixtures. The analysis confirmed that the size of the body of the alligators is related to the sound vibration they emit. “However, we did not test whether other animals understand from sound how big the reptile’s body is,” added a researcher from Lund University in Sweden.

IgNobel is usually delivered at the Sanders Theater at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, amid fun rites like flying paper airplanes everywhere, and a little girl screaming in boring speeches after a while is boring. However, due to the pandemic, the 30 awards were organized online, but some traditions were preserved, including the real Nobel prizes.

It is reber acoustic IgNobel was taken over by the psychology Miranda Giacomin and Nicholas Rule, who developed the identification of narcissistic people from the eyebrows. IgNobelt Peace The governments of India and Pakistan deserved it because secretly, in the middle of the night, their diplomats called each other and then fled before anyone could react.

A administration IgNobel, awarded in category A, was awarded to five Chinese assassins who turned in the work they received from their manager in the same way that contractors outsource work. They did not attend the ceremony for understandable reasons.

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A economic IgNobel winner Christopher Watkins and his colleagues sought to find a quantitative correlation between national income differences between countries and the average number of kisses.

Metin Eren and his fellow researchers benefited from the materials science In the IgNobel award because they have shown that knives made from frozen human feces cannot be used well. The physical Ivan Maksimov and Andriy Pototsky were recognized for examining what happens to the shape of the earthworm when it vibrates at high frequency.

Richard Vatter mint entomological received recognition after showing that many entomologists fear spiders, which are not actually insects.

IgNobel for Medical Education was also announced at the ceremony, which this time shared:

  • Jair Bolsonaro, President of Brazil,
  • Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom,
  • Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India
  • Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador
  • President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko,
  • President of the United States, Donald Trump
  • Recep Tayyip Erdogan Turkish President
  • Russian President Vladimir Putin also
  • The President of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow,

They have jointly demonstrated during the coronavirus epidemic that politicians have a much greater impact on life and death than doctors and researchers.

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The Hungarians won the physical IgNobel with the buggy-equestrian research


MTI / hvg.hu
World

Hungarian researchers and the man who lives like a goat also received the anti-Nobel prize this year. Those whose research first makes people laugh and then makes people think are recognized.