Reporter Zhao Shifeng Organize
The annual "Funny Nobel Prize" award ceremony was held in the United States on September 15. The "Funny Nobel Prize" was launched in 1991 by the American scientific humor magazine "Incredible Research Annual Report". The award is usually issued in September before the announcement of the Nobel Prize in , and the award ceremony is held at Harvard University . Affected by the new crown epidemic, it has been held online for three consecutive sessions since 2020. This year marks the 32nd "Funny Nobel Prize", and two teams in China have won awards in two projects.
10 unique research awards
At 18:00 on September 15, the 32nd "Funny Nobel Prize" was announced. Joan Burco Glisson, a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Psychology at Harvard University in the United States and 791-year-old Rongdeng professor at Boston University, gave a speech at the award ceremony. This is her 15th year of hosting the "Funny Nobel Prize" award ceremony.
This year's prize is a PDF printed by the winners themselves, which can be folded into a carton and "used to hold the brain." The bonus is an Zimbabwe currency with a denomination of up to 10 trillion yuan. Because this banknote is out of print on the market, its collection value is close to 1,000 yuan.
It is worth mentioning that among the 10 peculiar research projects that won this year, a team composed of Jiangsu University of Science and Technology and the University of Thclyde in the UK won the "Physics Award" for the benefit of studying the benefits of ducks marching in line. As early as 1994, Frank Fish, a biologist at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, was curious about a question - how to reduce individual energy consumption in groups of animals? The ducks can go into the water to swim after hatching 12 hours. The secret is that the mother ducks reduce the resistance of paddling for the ducks in front.
In 2021, researchers decided to review Fish's topic again. This time they used mathematical models to calculate the benefits of ducks queuing up to swim. The researchers found that the duck instinctively harnesses the waves generated by the duck mother to reduce drag. This "convenience" will be transmitted to the rear through the waves, so the little duck following the duck mother benefits the most, and the more you go back, the more labored it will be.
In addition, a research team from the Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences participated in the topic of "When do people tell the truth and when do they tell lies when they talk about gossip." The project that won the "Applied Heart Science Award" for
is "the heartbeat will be synchronized when two people fall in love at first sight." The researchers recruited 142 subjects in three major events: music festival, art exhibition and film festival in some places in the Netherlands. It was found in the experiment that both of the two subjects who were willing to see each other again, their heartbeats accelerated or slowed down at the same time.
"Literary Award" was awarded to "Is it intentional to not speak human words in the contract?" Legal contracts are known for their incomprehensible jargon and tormenting sentence structures. Researchers analyzed databases of legal contracts and court documents from 2018 to 2020 and compared them with magazines and novels. They found that what hinders understanding the most in legal texts is actually not professional concepts, but poor writing styles. These articles always insert long clause components in the middle of the sentence, causing the key information of the main sentence to be separated too far from each other, making the sentence difficult to understand and remember.
In addition, the project that won the "Medical Prize" is "eating ice cream can help reduce the side effects of chemotherapy"; the "Biology Prize" is "constipated scorpions can also mate"; the "Art History Award" was awarded to the research that "the enema scene on ancient Maya pots is a religious ritual"; the "Engineering Prize" is "the most comfortable turning the knob with a few fingers"; the "Economic Prize" is attributed to the research team of "success belongs to the luckiest person"; the "Safety Engineering Prize" is subject to the research topic of "what to do if a car crashes into moose "; the research project that won the "Peace Prize" is "When people talk about gossip, when do people tell the truth and when do they tell lies".
Chiba University of Technology
Japanese won the award for 16 consecutive years
0 Since 2007, the Japanese have won the "Funny Nobel Prize" for 16 consecutive years.This year, Chiba University of Technology professor Matsuzaki Moto and others, who studied "When rotating a cylindrical handle with one hand, are the most comfortable to use a few fingers", won the "Engineering Award". Matsuzaki said in an interview with Kyodo News that he was "I'm glad that the focus of the research has been positively evaluated."
In their research, they tested cylindrical handles of various thicknesses, analyzed that using several fingers for rotation is the most appropriate, and clarified the finger position when twisting the handle, etc. The results show that the thicker the cylinder, the more fingers used.
people will subconsciously change the finger index used when rotating according to the thickness of the cylinder. This research result will work when designing items. According to " Nihon Keizaki Shimbun ", this research was that Matsuzaki Moto has been going on for 25 years. At first, many people evaluated it as "funny" and "trouble", but he has won 8 industrial design awards since then, and now he has won the "funny Nobel Prize".
This study was released from 1998 to 1999, when Matsuzaki Moto was studying for a postgraduate degree at Chiba University of Technology. Other winners include Ichio Ouchi, Katsu Uehara, Yoshiyuki Ueno and Goro Imura, who were in charge of mentoring Matsuzaki at Chiba University of Technology at the time.
People looking down at their phones on the way
Last year, a research team composed of Kuru Murakami and others from Kyoto Technical Fiber University won the "Kinetics Award". Murakami and others verified that when two groups of pedestrians walked towards each other and passed each other in places such as pedestrian crossings, if some of them were "head-down people" who looked down at their mobile phones, they might disrupt the pace of themselves and the people around them, so they dodge each other before a collision. The study concluded that if visual attention is diverted and the other party’s behavior cannot be predicted, collisions may occur.
In 2020, an international research team composed of Takashi Nishimura and others, an approved professor at the Institute of Primates at Kyoto University, won the "Acoustics Award". When studying crocodiles' vocalization methods, the team found that the Hertz of the crocodile's screaming increased after using helium .
sound travels faster in helium than in the air, so after helium is inhaled, the resonance frequency of in the air in the occurrence cavity will become higher. The study puts , Yangtze alligator native to China, in a sink filled with helium and oxygen, and then records its call. It turned out that the original sound of about 400 Hz doubled to about 800 Hz. Based on this, the research team found that crocodiles, like mammals, use the "vocal duct" on their vocal cords to vibrate the air to make sound. According to Takashi Nishimura, dinosaurs with similar classification to crocodiles are also likely to make sounds in the same way.
At the award ceremony of the "Funny Nobel Prize", Shigeru Watanabe (left) demonstrated the saliva sampling process with his three sons on the spot.
In 2019, the award-winning professor Shigeru Watanabe's research topic was "The amount of saliva of 5-year-old children". This study seems a bit inexplicable, and even if it is understood, it is of no use. However, out of curiosity and inquiry, this study won the "Honorary Award" of that year.
"Funny Nobel Prize" requires researchers to have tough endurance. Shigeru Watanabe repeatedly conducted experiments to let 5-year-old children chew food and then spit it out, and finally concluded the amount of saliva in one day and wrote it into a paper, which reflects this research spirit. Watanabe's son is also said to have participated in the experiment.
Online award ceremony.
makes people laugh and makes people think
1991 "Funny Nobel Prize" was established to praise those research results that make people laugh and think. Awards are presented to those “first makes people laugh and then think” research and recognize 10 unusual or trivial scientific research achievements.
However, the "Funny Nobel Prize"'s evaluation of innovation is no less than that of the Nobel Prize. A scientist once won the Nobel Prize after winning the "Funny Nobel Prize". In 2000, British physicist Andre Heim made the frog float up through magnetic levitation technology and won the "Funny Physics Award" of that year. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering graphene. Moreover, he is also one of the award presenters for this year's "Funny Nobel Prize".
Now, the "Funny Nobel Prize" has received funding from many universities and research institutions including Harvard University, and has also become an indispensable "scheduling scene" before the Nobel Prize awards every year. Every year, the "Funny Nobel Prize" jury will receive nearly 10,000 new nominations from around the world, and all the nominees who were not selected before constitute the candidates of that year. The jury selected 10 award-winning projects from them, which can be said to be one in a million.
Andre Heim's funny expression at the Nobel Prize Awards ceremony.
In fact, most of the winners of the "Funny Nobel Prize" are conducting serious scientific research in their respective fields, not aiming to win the "Funny Nobel Prize". For example, this year's "Economics Award" was to reveal "why 20% of the world's people have 80% of their wealth", two physicists and an economist at the University of Catania, , , , used the "agent model" to simulate 10,000 "people" and found that the talent of "first place" is often similar to the average level. The reason why they are "richest" is just that they happen to encounter good things. However, only about 30% of people with talent than average level can keep the initial "10 yuan" after one operation.
This study found that in an environment with high overall public quality, people with higher talents have a better chance of making a name for themselves, which proves the importance of popular education. In addition, if the industrial environment is good and there are many opportunities, it will also help people with high talents to perform well.
"Funny Nobel Prize" adheres to the principle of making people laugh and thought-provoking. While winning the award, it is also a matter of laughter, and we have to admire the judges' wisdom and knowledge. In 2020, the Indian and Pakistani governments also won the award, citing diplomats from both countries like to secretly ring each other's doorbell in the middle of the night and then leave immediately. In 2018, India and Pakistan had a dispute over in Kashmir, and accused each other of harassing their diplomats. India said that the doorbell of its diplomat stationed in Pakistan was ringed at 3 a.m. A few days later, the doorbell of a diplomat stationed in India was also ringed at 3 a.m.
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