"Nose hairs in cadavers," “Electrified Chopsticks,” "Re-animating dead spiders."

2023 Ig Nobel Prize winners

The Ig Nobel Prizes for 2023 have been awarded.¹ The Ig Nobel Prize is a satiric prize awarded annually since 1991 to celebrate ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. Its aim is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think."

The 2023 Winners

CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK]
Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.
REFERENCE: “Eating Fossils,” Jan Zalasiewicz, The Paleontological Association Newsletter, no. 96, November 2017.  Eating fossils | The Palaeontological Association (palass.org)

LITERATURE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK, MALAYSIA, FINLAND]
Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O’Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.
REFERENCE: “The The The The Induction of Jamais Vu in the Laboratory: Word Alienation and Semantic Satiation,” Chris J. A. Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira R. O’Connor, Memory, vol. 29, no. 7, 2021, pp. 933-942. 

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA]
Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.
REFERENCE: “Necrobotics: Biotic Materials as Ready-to-Use Actuators,” Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor J. Shimokusu, and Daniel J. Preston, Advanced Science, vol. 9, no. 29, 2022.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies — including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal-print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link — to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete.
REFERENCE: “A Mountable Toilet System for Personalized Health Monitoring via the Analysis of Excreta,” Seung-min Park, Daeyoun D. Won, Brian J. Lee, Diego Escobedo, Andre Esteva, Amin Aalipour, T. Jessie Ge, et al., Nature Biomedical Engineering, vol. 4, no. 6, 2020, pp. 624-635. 

COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA]
María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.
REFERENCE: “Neurocognitive Signatures of Phonemic Sequencing in Expert Backward Speakers,” María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo L. Berthier, and Adolfo M. García, Scientific Reports, vol. 10, no. 10621, 2020. 

MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, CANADA, MACEDONIA, IRAN, VIETNAM]
Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils.
REFERENCE: “The Quantification and Measurement of Nasal Hairs in a Cadaveric Population,” Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Margit Juhasz, and Natasha Atanaskova Mesinkovska, Journal of The American Academy of Dermatology, vol. 83, no. 6, 2020, pp. AB202-AB202. 

NUTRITION PRIZE [JAPAN]
Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.
REFERENCE: “Augmented Gustation Using Electricity,” Hiromi Nakamura and Homei Miyashita, Proceedings of the 2nd Augmented Human International Conference, March 2011, article 34. 

EDUCATION PRIZE [CHINA, CANADA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN]
Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.
REFERENCE: “Boredom Begets Boredom: An Experience Sampling Study on the Impact of Teacher Boredom on Student Boredom and Motivation,” Katy Y.Y. Tam, Cyanea Y. S. Poon, Victoria K.Y. Hui, Christy Y. F. Wong, Vivian W.Y. Kwong, Gigi W.C. Yuen, Christian S. Chan, British Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 90, no. S1, June 2020, pp. 124-137.  doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12549

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA]
Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward
REFERENCE: “Note on the Drawing Power of Crowds of Different Size,” Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 13, no. 2, 1969, pp. 79-82.

PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK]
Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.
REFERENCE: “Intense Upper Ocean Mixing Due to Large Aggregations of Spawning Fish,” Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, Nature Geoscience, vol. 15, 2022, pp. 287–292. 

The 2023 Ig Nobel Prize winners

1. improbable.com