Shnobelevka-2016
Winners of the Nobel Prize 2016
Anatoly Alizar, Geektimes
On September 22, 2016, the annual Nobel Prize ceremony was held. As usual, this award is given to scientists for funny, at first glance, scientific discoveries that "make you laugh first, and then think." This year, the winners received 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars. By the way, the director of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Mathematics back in 2009.
These discoveries are always funny, but this does not negate their practical significance. For example, the Dunning-Kruger effect (winner of the Nobel Prize in 2000) explains a lot in the formation of the social hierarchy of human society. Or take the Association of Dead People of India. It protects the rights of unfortunate citizens, whom the authorities have registered as deceased in order to seize their property (the 2003 Peace Prize), is also a rather urgent problem. In other years, the awards received research that the presence of people sexually excites ostriches; that black holes are suitable in their parameters as the location of hell; checking the urban legend of the five-second rule, etc. All these are real scientific papers published in reputable journals. The Nobel Prize is also awarded to real Nobel laureates. For example, the Russian-British physicist Andrey Geim received it for his research on the use of magnets to levitate a frog.
This year has been rich in interesting scientific discoveries. For example, a team of German scientists received a prize in medicine for an incredible discovery: if it itches on the left side of the body, then itching can be relieved by looking in the mirror and scratching the appropriate place on the right side of the body, and vice versa (scientific article "Itch Relief by Mirror Scratching. A Psychophysical Study" published in the journal PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no 12, December 26, 2013, e82756).
The award in the field of reproduction and reproduction was received by the Egyptian urologist Ahmed Shafiq, who thoroughly investigated how wearing underpants made of 100% polyester, 100% cotton, 100% wool, as well as 50/50% cotton/wool affects the sexual life of rats. It turned out that rats who wore polyester underpants for six months were significantly less active in sex. The scientist suggested that this may be due to the electrostatic charge that creates the material (scientific article "Effect of Different Types of Textiles on Sexual Activity. Experimental study" published in the journal European Urology, vol. 24, No. 3, 1993, pp. 375-80).
An illustration from a scientific article by Ahmed Shafiq
A group of scientists from New Zealand and the UK was awarded the prize for an amazing study of "brand identity" on the example of... stones. According to the survey of respondents, individual stones received specific "personality characteristics", depending on their appearance. For example, the respondent saw the stone as "a big businessman from New York, rich, calm, maybe a little suspicious." One respondent assigned to another stone the characteristics of "a person leading a nomadic lifestyle, a traveler," and another saw "a liberal, attractive young woman who used to work as a model, prefers organic products." The research has undoubted practical value from the point of view of marketing, sales and product branding (scientific article "The Brand Personality of Rocks: A Critical Evaluation of a Brand Personality Scale" published in the journal Marketing Theory, vol. 14, No. 4, 2014, pp. 451-475).
The prize in biology was shared by two Britons: Charles Foster, who led a natural way of life at different times as a badger, otter, deer, fox and bird (in the role of a badger, the researcher ate worms and tried to sniff out wolves, as a city fox rummaged through garbage cans and slept in yards); as well as his like-minded Thomas Thwaites for inventing artificial limb extensions that allowed him to move around the hills in a herd of goats in the Swiss Alps, where he ate grass for three days, bleated and jumped on rocks. Both inquisitive minds have written books about their experiences (books "Goatman; How I Took a Holiday from Being Human", Princeton Architectural Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1616894054; "Being a Beast", Profile Books, 2016, ISBN 978-1781255346).
Thomas Thwaites with artificial limbs
One day Thomas Thwaites almost got into a fight with other goats. "Well, you know, I was just walking around, chewing grass. I raised my head – and suddenly I see that everyone else has stopped chewing, and some kind of tension is growing around me, which I hadn't noticed before. Then one or two goats with horns at the ready began to scurry around, clearly intending to gore me. I thought I couldn't avoid a fight with them," he told the BBC.
Scientists from Hungary, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland shared the physics prize for the discovery that white horses attract fewer insects, and that dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones (scientific article "An Unexpected Advantage of Whiteness in Horses: The Most Horsefly-Proof Horse Has a Depolarizing White Coat" published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol. 277 No. 1688, pp. June 2010, pp. 1643-1650; article "Ecological Traps for Dragonflies in a Cemetery: The Attraction of Sympetrum species (Odonata: Libellulidae) by Horizontally Polarizing Black Grave-Stones" published in Freshwater Biology, vol. 52, vol. 9, September 2007, pp. 1700-9).
The psychology award was awarded to an international team of scientists from Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada and the USA for a large-scale survey of 1,000 liars about how often they lied during their lives, how professionally they did it, and how their skills improved over the years. It turned out that children lie more and more as they grow up, reaching a peak in lying in adolescence. Adults lie on average twice a day, and with age the indicator decreases, with rare exceptions. Scientists also quite logically assumed that the respondents could have lied during the survey (the scientific article "From Junior to Senior Pinocchio: A Cross-Sectional Lifespan Investigation of Deception" was published in the journal Acta Psychologica, vol. 160, 2015, pp. 58-68).
The Peace Prize was taken by philosophers from Canada and the USA for a scientific treatise entitled "On the perception and recognition of pseudo-deep-minded nonsense." Philosophers have studied how people perceive gibberish that looks meaningful, framed in the form of random grammatical sentences with buzzwords and science-like terms. Such phrases are designed to hypnotize office workers or distract the attention of dentist patients. For example, these are phrases such as "wholeness, which surpasses the phenomenon of infinity with its silence" or "hidden meaning transforms incomparable abstract beauty". Scientists believe that delusional statements are a real logical phenomenon that can be more widespread than ever in the modern era of ubiquitous communications and the Internet. As examples, they cite some tweets of famous personalities with millions of followers on Twitter. The question is how much people are able to recognize blatant nonsense in the text (scientific article "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit" published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549-563).
In all the winners of the Nobel Prize, the public launched paper airplanes.
The prize for literature went to Sweden, where the writer Fredrik Sieberg lives. He wrote an autobiographical trilogy about his life, in which he learned the pleasure of collecting dead flies, as well as live flies ("The Fly Trap", the first volume of the autobiographical trilogy "En Flugsamlares Vag". Pantheon Books, 2015, ISBN 978-1101870150).
The chemistry prize was deservedly awarded to Volkswagen, which solved the problem of environmental pollution with an original automatic and electromechanical solution that lowered exhaust emissions during any measurement (report "EPA, California Notify Volkswagen of Clean Air Act Violations" of the US Environmental Protection Agency, September 18, 2015).
Finally, the prize in the field of perception was awarded to two Japanese researchers for studying how the perception of the size and distance to an object changes if you bend over and look at it through the gap between your legs (scientific article "Perceived size and Perceived Distance of Targets Viewed From Between the Legs: Evidence for Proprioceptive Theory", Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, Vision Research, vol. 46, No. 23, November 2006, pp. 3961-76).
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru
23.09.2016