Scientists given ‘honors’ at ‘IG Nobel Prizes’ for unusual studies — including anchovy sex, nose hair counts

They blinded them with wacky science.

Scientists were given top “honors” for counting nose hair and studying anchovies’ sexual activity at this year’s IG Nobel Prizes, a parody of the Nobel Prize.

The lighthearted but brainy annual ceremony, first held in 1991, recognizes the 10 most unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research around the world.

Jan Zalasiewicz, a paleontologist from Poland, took home a prize for explaining why many scientists lick rocks.

“Licking the rock, of course, is part of the geologist’s and paleontologist’s armory of tried-and-much-tested techniques used to help survive in the field,” Zalasiewicz wrote in The Palaeontological Association newsletter. “Wetting the surface allows fossil and mineral textures to stand out sharply, rather than being lost in the blur of intersecting micro-reflections and micro-refractions that come out of a dry surface.”

A group of scientists hailing from India, China, Malaysia and the United States landed a prize for studying how to repurpose dead spiders. Their team managed to successfully transform a dead wolf spider into a gripping tool.

“The useful properties of biotic materials, refined by nature over time, eliminate the need to artificially engineer these materials, exemplified by our early ancestors wearing animal hides as clothing and constructing tools from bones,” they explained in Advanced Science, a scientific journal.

The event, now in its 33rd year, used to be held at Harvard University, but since the pandemic, has been pre-recorded and streamed online.

It is produced by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research and sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.

With Post Wires