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Have you heard the one with the alligator who performed the helium breathing party trick so he could speak with a funny voice?
It’s not that funny, but then you should be careful never to smile at a crocodile.
Stephan Reber and his colleagues conducted the experiment to try to understand how alligators can communicate.
It was a serious investigation, but its slightly humorous looks just won the team an Ig Nobel Prize.
Ten of these awards were presented Thursday by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.
The annual Igs are intended as a parody of the more sober Nobel prizes in science.
Other 2020 winners included the team that devised a method to identify narcissists by examining their eyebrows; and the group who wanted to see what happened when earthworms vibrated at high frequencies.
All these kinds of things sound silly, but when you dig a little deeper you realize that much of the research praised by the Ig Nobel is actually intended to address real-world problems and is published in peer-reviewed academic journals.
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Annals of improbable investigations
A true Nobel laureate, Andre Geim (bottom left), prepares to present the Ig Nobel Prize in Acoustics to Stephan Reber (middle) and his team
Dr Reber told BBC News that he was honored to receive the Ig.
His team’s study had tried to show that crocodiles and other reptiles could announce their body size through their vocalizations, something mammals and birds can do when they scream.
“The resonances in your vocal tract sound lower in general if you are larger because it is a larger space in which the air can vibrate. We did not know if the reptiles really had resonances. The frogs, the amphibians, do not, for Example. I needed a proof of concept that crocodilians really have resonances, “he explained.
This was achieved by placing a crocodile in a closed tank that could be alternately filled with normal air and a supply of oxygen and helium (heliox). The vibrations of the vocal tissues do not change, but the noise that animals can make does, because the speed of sound is different in different gas mixtures.
Analysis of the frequency spectrum confirmed that the body size of alligators does correlate with the resonances they produce. “Although I have not tested whether animals can pick up these signals,” said the researcher from the University of Lund, Sweden.
This is the thirtieth year that the Ig Nobel have been presented.
His usual home is the Sanders Theater at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States; and the event is always a riotous affair involving lots of paper airplane launches and a little girl yelling “bored” at anyone who talks too much.
But the Covid-19 crisis forced this year’s ceremony online.
Even so, some traditions were maintained, such as the participation of real Nobel laureates. Dr Reber’s team received their Ig from Andre Geim, the UK-based researcher who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for his work on graphene.
The professor is something of a superstar who also earned an Ig early in his career for levitating frogs.
Here is a complete list of the 2020 Ig Nobel winners. Each winning team received a cash prize: a 10 billion Zimbabwe dollar bill.
For acoustics: Stephan Reber, Takeshi Nishimura, Judith Janisch, Mark Robertson and Tecumseh Fitch, for inducing a Chinese alligator to bellow in an airtight chamber filled with helium-enriched air.
Psychology: Miranda Giacomin and Nicholas Rule, for devising a method to identify narcissists by examining their eyebrows.
Peace: The governments of India and Pakistan, for making their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other’s doorbell in the middle of the night and then flee before anyone has a chance to open the door.
Physical: Ivan Maksymov and Andriy Pototsky, to determine, experimentally, what happens to the shape of a live earthworm when the earthworm is vibrated at high frequency.
Economic Sciences: Christopher Watkins and colleagues for trying to quantify the relationship between national income inequality in different countries and the average number of mouth-to-mouth kisses.
Administration: Xi Guang-An, Mo Tian-Xiang, Yang Kang-Sheng, Yang Guang-Sheng, and Ling Xian Si, five professional hitmen in Guangxi, China, who subcontracted a murder to each other without either of them ultimately taking the crime out.
Entomology: Richard Vetter, for collecting evidence that many entomologists (scientists who study insects) fear spiders, which are not insects.
Medical education: Jair Bolsonaro from Brazil, Boris Johnson from the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi from India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador from Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko from Belarus, Donald Trump from the United States, Recep Tayyip Erdogan from Turkey, Vladimir Putin from Russia and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan, for using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors.
Material science: Metin Eren, Michelle Bebber, James Norris, Alyssa Perrone, Ashley Rutkoski, Michael Wilson, and Mary Ann Raghanti, for showing that knives made from frozen human feces don’t work well.
[email protected] and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos
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