Shnobelevka-2011
The end of the world, armored personnel carriers and pairing with bottles"Newspaper.
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The 2011 Nobel Prize was awarded for research on the mating of beetles with beer bottles and the effect of urination urges on human cognitive activity. Special laureates were the Mayor of Vilnius, who, using the APC, solved the problem of incorrect parking in his city, as well as unsuccessful predictors of the end of the world in 1954, 1982, 1990, 1992, 1997 and 2011.
The ceremony of awarding the Nobel Prize (in another way - Antinobel or Ignobel, from the English word "Ignoble" – shameful) this year at Harvard was held according to all the rules: there was also singing about chemistry (the participants of the 2011 ceremony received miniature tables of the Periodic System of Chemical Elements as souvenirs), the traditional group launch of paper airplanes, well and, of course, a screaming eight-year-old girl who interrupted the solemn speeches of the laureates.
One of the most piquant pseudoscientific achievements recognized by the organizers in 2011 was the work of Australian biologists Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz. 23 years ago, they discovered that males of some beetle species tend to try to mate with bottles of beer of a certain brand. "Since then, every year we have been waiting for a call and an invitation to the ceremony," said Gwynn, who took the long–awaited "Nobel Prize" in biology.
Peter Snider, a professor of neurology at Brown University, studied the effect of urination urges on cognitive activity. He showed that if a person really wants to go to the toilet, his memory is weakened as much as if he had not slept for 24 hours.
The favorite of the hall this year was the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize – the Mayor of Vilnius Arturas Zuokas. In a commercial shown on television this year, the mayor of the Lithuanian capital offers a radical way to combat illegal parking of expensive cars in the city center – you just need to ram them on armored personnel carriers. Judging by the ovations that Zuokas got, many participants of the award themselves saw the famous video in which the mayor, driving an armored personnel carrier with his own hand, drives through an incorrectly parked Mercedes (let's be honest, the most inexpensive of the law-abiding cars shown on the video). "The video is very popular: almost 7 million people have already watched it," Zuokas managed to note, until an eight–year-old girl interrupted him. By the way, the threat turned out to be effective: drivers in Vilnius began to take their actions more responsibly, and the problem of illegal parking, if not solved, then passed into the category of not the most serious. I wonder if Sergei Sobyanin will decide to adopt this method in the literal and figurative sense of the word.
The automotive theme did not end there. In the 60s of the last century, John Sanders from the University of Toronto (Canada) conducted a pioneering study of absent-mindedness when driving a car. "Today, most people would consider this study dangerous, but then there were no organized supervisory commissions," the laureate said. The experiment consisted in the following: a helmet with a "visor" was developed for drivers – a visor that, when lowered, does not allow them to see the road at all. A convenient mechanism allowed the driver to lower and raise the visor if necessary. The subjects were assigned the following task: they had to keep the visor closed (that is, lead blindly) until they had a feeling that it was still worth looking at the road. As soon as the situation "normalized", they had to lower the visor again and go "by touch". By measuring the time drivers spend with their visors up and down, and comparing it with the traffic density on the roads at any given time, Sanders found that the busier the road, the more attentive drivers should be. The result may seem obvious, but Sanders collected experimental data to directly confirm it. "Almost no one has read the article for 30 years. Then the widespread use of cell phones and the widespread study of their distracting effect began, and someone unearthed my work," Sanders, who received the award for public safety, explained his current fame.
The laureates were also Japanese scientists who created an alarm system based on the aroma of wasabi. They found out that the Japanese seasoning contains components that are irritants to the nose and can act even if a person is asleep. "Therefore, people can wake up from inhaling air in which wasabi is present," said Makoto Imai from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Medical Sciences in Shiga, one of the laureates.
The winners of the "Schnobel" in the field of mathematics were numerous predictors of the end of the world. According to their data, the end of the world was supposed to come in 1954, 1982, 1990, 1992, 1997 and 2011. Although none of the winners in this category appeared at the ceremony, the founder of the award, Mark Abraham, noted that they were awarded "for teaching the world to be more careful in mathematical calculations and conclusions from them."
Karl Teige from the University of Oslo became a laureate in psychology, having studied the question of why people sigh. "We decided to choose a topic where we could conduct original work, and it turned out, to our surprise, that there are no empirical studies on sighs in psychology," he said. The study found that most people consider sighs to be a sign of sadness and disappointment, while their own feelings when they sigh, most often expressed humility.
Anna Wilkinson from the University of Lincoln, who became the winner of the physiology prize, tried for six months to teach a turtle named Alexandra to yawn on command. Then the trained turtle was used for experiments on her companions: Dr. Wilkinson observed whether other turtles would yawn after Alexandra. "Contagious" yawning is common in humans, and scientists suggest that it is controlled through empathy, since in order to "copy" a yawn, you need to be able to realize the emotional state of a neighbor. "On turtles, we were unable to find evidence of social learning and visual perception characteristic of humans," Wilkinson explained. The turtles refused to yawn together with their trained colleague: apparently, they did not have any cognitive mechanisms for this.
The winner of the literature Prize, John Perry, struck into philosophical reflections on the essence of laziness and the fight against it. If you want to achieve a lot in life, but you can't stop procrastinating, constantly do something important: this is a great way to postpone even more important things! Perry's advice on "structured procrastination" was published in the Chronicle for Higher Education magazine in the 90s.
The physics Prize winners, a group of scientists from France and the Netherlands, have established why discus throwers suffer from dizziness, while hammer throwers do not face this problem.
Recall that the Nobel Prize award ceremony takes place on the Friday preceding the week in which the Nobel Prize laureates will be announced. Next Monday, October 3, the winners of this "Nobel" in the field of physiology and medicine will be named.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru02.10.2011