By S. Jayasankaran
If you are a sensitive person, the 21st Century, with its relentless bombardment of sensory info, may not be the place for you.
Say you understand the Morse code: a tap dancer would drive you crazy.
Similarly, all the info out there could make any would-be scientist unsure. As was Tomaki Kojima who felt he might be indecisive but wasn’t sure.
So, when he finally hit on an idea for scientific study, sure enough, it was a doozy.
Tomaki et al wondered if painting cows with zebra-like stripes would prevent flies from biting them.
The Japanese team meticulously put tape on beef cows and then spray-painted them with white stripes.
It was Tomaki-san’s eureka moment: fewer flies were attracted to the cows and they seemed less bothered by said insects. The zebras carped that they knew all along but their grumblings were dismissed.
There’s only one problem. The intrepid scientist admitted it might be “tricky” applying his findings on a large-scale.
Tomaki-san and his team won this year’s Ig-Nobel Prize for Biology,
Since 1991, the Ig-Nobel Prize has “honoured” research that “first makes people laugh and then makes them think.”
The prizes are awarded by actual Nobel laureates with the prize money being another doozy: a solitary banknote for the amount of 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars (USD 0.40). Even so, the note has since become a collector’s item.
Mr Tomaki’s award for a zebra’s fly-resistant powers left both thrilled.
The zebras chastely declined comment but Kojima-san was rapturous. “Unbelievable. Just unbelievable,” gushed the ignoble biologist who painted himself with stripes to honour the occasion. “It’s been my dream.”
Another penetratingly perspicacious paper pondered the types of pizza lizards preferred to eat. Today’s lizard diet could be tomorrow’s Herpes Defence. Who knows?
The year’s winners, honoured in 10 categories, also include a European group that found drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak a foreign language, and a researcher who studied fingernail growth for decades. He’s come out with a book for the ages: Watching Nails Grow; How To Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting To Kill You.
The 35th annual Ig-Nobel prize ceremony is organised by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights meaningless research weeks before the actual Nobel Prizes are announced.
This year’s ceremony included a section called the 24-second lecture where top researchers explain their work in 24 seconds.
Among them was Gus Rancatore, who spent most of his time licking an ice cream cone and repeatedly saying yum and Trisha Pasricha, who explained her work studying smartphone use on the toilet and the potential risk for haemorrhoids.
Other winners this year included a group from India that studied whether foul-smelling shoes influenced someone’s experience using a shoe rack, and researchers from the United States and Israel who explored whether eating Teflon is a good way to increase food volume.
There was also a team of international scientists that looked at whether giving alcohol to bats impaired their ability to fly.
Flying under the influence might be batty? Stranger things have happened.
Finally, there was an Italian paper on the physics of pasta sauce. As an aside, this team was bet by a Chinese scientist that it couldn’t make a car out of spaghetti.
To quote one of the Italians: “You should have seen her face when we drove paste.”
(The views expressed here are entirely those of the writer)
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