Last weekend, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to scientists Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless for their discovery of the reaction that allowed molecules to bind together to produce new compounds.
, while Solimary García-Hernández and Glauco Machado from the University of São Paulo in Brazil won the award for studying the mating habits of constipated scorpions. But what they won was not the Nobel Prize for , but the Nobel Prize for Funny.
These awards announced in mid-September may not be as respected by the academic community as the Nobel Prize.
Funny Nobel Prize was established in 1991 by Mark Abrahams, editor and co-founder of the scientific humor magazine "The Record of Impossible Research".
22 Medical Award was awarded to a team at the University of Warsaw , which demonstrated that painful oral ulcers caused by the cancer drug Melphalan can be helped by patients eating ice cream or popsicles. The
Physics Award was awarded to Frank E. Fish of West Chester University and a team from Transclyde University and Jiangsu University of Science and Technology , who tried to understand why the ducks were swimming in a straight line. The
Art History Award was awarded to two researchers who used a multidisciplinary method to analyze the enema scene on ancient Mayan pottery jars.
Past winners include New Zealander James Watson, whose article focuses on why New Zealand peasant pants explode in the 1930s; Dutch scientist Frans de Waal and American scientist Jennifer Pokorny have confirmed that chimpanzees can recognize different individuals by identifying photos of the same type of butt; French psychologist Laurent Begue, who found that people do think they are more attractive after drinking.
But what is the significance of these studies? Some may unceremoniously describe it as meaningless or wasteful.
Allan Blackman, a professor of chemistry at Auckland Polytechnic University , said that while these studies and experiments seem silly on the surface, some of them do have practical applications in the future.
"The 2000 Prize for Physics [is] about hanging frogs in the air with magnets."
" One of the authors of this paper is Andre Jem from the University of Nijmegen, Netherlands, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010, which made him the only winner of the funny Nobel Prize and Nobel Prize."
" His work has [led to actually progress] ]: Obviously, the Chinese are very interested in magnetic levitation because they want to create a space close to the gravity of the moon. So, they are doing this with magnets now. This is a continuation of Andre Jem's research, so it's not all stupid. "
" It's not just for fun. Most of them are real scientific research, generally done by people from institutions around the world, and published in scientific journals. "
Allan Professor Blackman said another important undercurrent of the award is the display of the creativity and pleasure that comes with conducting research for research.
"A little politically implied that today's funding agencies almost require you to come up with the results of your proposal before you actually start working. You can't know that. And it seems very shortsighted: everything has to have a program, you can't study just for research, you won't get funded for doing so, you have to commit to changing the world." Professor Allan Blackman said that while some people may be offended by the idea that academia -- usually funded by taxpayers' money -- is researched on the hemorrhage properties of orgasm, most academic progress is low-key and progressive.
"The whole meaning of academia lies in teaching. Without students, we wouldn't have a university."
" Teaching is absolutely important. I think research is after this. And what research are you doing? You are working hard to advance knowledge and study things you haven't done before."
" 0.0001% of all the research done by all universities in the world may change the world, but everything else is an advancement in human knowledge. Because of these work, we know what we didn’t know yesterday. I think this is very important. "
