 Well, this is the year 2023, 2023, the fourth year of the COVID-19 pandemic. For the fourth year in a row, the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony is not in its traditional home, Sanders Theatre at Harvard University. So here I am in the Netherlands, basking by the Bank of the Charming Canal. So I will skip the usual theatre safety announcements of identifying the newest exits, silencing all phones and electronic devices and no smoking in the theatre, etc. So again, this year, do any darn thing you like. Don't identify the nearest exit, shout at your phone, or eat something. Now, get your paper airplanes ready. I said get your paper airplanes ready, because the 33rd first annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony is about to begin. Good evening. I'm Robin Abrams, your airplane announcer and author of the misconduct advice column in the Boston Globe. There will be three airplane tosses tonight. Do you have your airplane ready? Keep it in the hangar. And welcome to the 33rd first annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. The airplane is ready to launch in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Go! Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the 33rd first annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. And now, Professor Jean Berco Gleason will deliver the traditional Ig Nobel Welcome Welcome speech. Welcome. Welcome. We are going to award this year's Ig Nobel Prizes. I am Karen Huckin, creator of the Stugmuffins of Science calendar. Soon, we will welcome our most special guests, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners. This year's winners represent many continents and even more countries. Now, ladies and gentlemen, literati and glitterati, intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals, quasi-seudo-intellectuals, pseudo-quasi-intellectuals, walking encyclopedias, know-it-alls, and well, the rest of you. May I introduce our master of ceremonies, the editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, Chief Airhead, Mark Abrams. Today, we honor some remarkable individuals and groups. Every Ig Nobel Prize winner has done something that makes people first laugh, then think. The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony is produced by the magazine, The Annals of Improbable Research. It's proudly co-sponsored by the Harvard Radcliffe Society of Physics students and the Harvard Radcliffe Science Fiction Association. This is year four of the COVID-19 pandemic. It's also the 33rd year of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Because of the pandemic, instead of doing the ceremony with 1,100 delightful, eccentric people jammed together in a big theater at Harvard University, we are again here in 2023 doing the entire ceremony online and at sea in a certain sense. Let's refresh your memory or bring you up to speed with a 15-second-long look at how we do it when it's not a pandemic. Commence paper airplane. Welcome. That was pretty quick. The editors of The Annals of Improbable Research have chosen a theme for this year's Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. That theme is water. The theme may or may not apply to particular prizes. Tonight, 10 prizes will be given. The achievements speak for themselves all too eloquently. The prizes will be presented to the winners by Nobel Laureates. Ladies and gentlemen and whoever, please welcome the Nobel Laureates. A 2018 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Francis Arnold. Oh, I've got some good ones. A 2008 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Marty Chalfee. Trying to get these prizes is very, very difficult. A 1994 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, Peter Darvey. I was reluctant to Google that because I thought I might get some very inappropriate stuff back onto my university email account. A 2019 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Esther Duflo. It's a very long way from Labdville. I don't know what I could say. A 2001 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Wolfgang Ketterla. Research is going well. We're making new discoveries. It's good. A 2007 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Eric Maskin. Is Squiggler a SpongeBob character? He is. He plays the character. A 2021 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, Artem Pataputian. What kinds of props with bathroom teams is going to be fun? A 1993 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, Rich Roberts. That's when I thought I was going to get thrown out of school. I wanted to become a professional billiards player. At the time I was the West of England junior snooker champion. But then the headmaster decided he wasn't going to throw me out of school after all. I feel I missed my opportunity for fame. A 2012 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Al Roth. So you have a hat. I have a hat. A 2001 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. And he also won another one last year in 2022, also in Chemistry. Barry Sharpless. I love water. I mean that's my favorite thing on the whole planet. A 1990 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Jerome Friedman. Was again prevented from joining us. But here he is via the magic of an old video recording. Congratulations. I hope you are enjoying this as much as I am. A specially edited audio recording of the ceremony will be broadcast on Public Radio's Science Friday with Ira Flato program on the day after Thanksgiving. And now let's get it over with. Ladies, gentlemen, whoever, the awarding of the 2023 Ig Nobel Prizes. We are giving out 10 prizes. The winners come from many nations. This year's winners have truly earned their prizes. Karen and Christopher, tell them what they've won. This year's winners each receive an Ig Nobel Prize. Gosh. And a piece of paper. A piece of paper saying they've won an Ig Nobel Prize. Gosh. Oh, this piece of paper has been signed by several Nobel Laureates. Oh, God. They also get money. $10 trillion. Gosh. $10 trillion. A Zimbabwean $10 trillion bill. Super-sized one. Gosh. Okay. Now I'm going to show you the this year's Ig Nobel Prize. This year's Ig Nobel Prize is a PDF document that can be emailed, printed out, and assembled to form a box. Yeah. A box of a very small box. Well, yes, it's a small box. But this box contains many cans, 12 mini cans of cola. Cola is made with water, you know. Oh, wait. The box says it may contain fewer than 12 cans. Hey, the box also says, Warding does not contain cola. Oh. Gosh. I said gosh. You said it. The Chemistry and Geology Prize. The winner is from the UK and Poland. The Chemistry and Geology Prize is awarded to Jan Zalasiewicz for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks. The prize will be presented by Nobel Laureate Rich Roberts. Well, really is a great pleasure to be able to give you this prize. I have to admit I'm a chemist by training, but I never learned to lick rocks. Congratulations. Thank you very much indeed. It's a great pleasure to have this prize and to fall such a fundamental thing indeed in geology and chemistry as licking rocks, which geologists do all the time in the field because something that's not very clear then becomes much clearer. When you look at it with a wet surface and so I'm a field geologist, I've licked a million rocks, but 200 years ago geologists were licking rocks to find out what they were with no machines, no textbooks, no microscopes, no chemistry indeed. They did geology at least in part by taste and it worked for them. I'm going to give you something they never got to have. It comes along with the prize. Here's your $10 trillion bill. Oh, that's super. Thank you. Yes, that's riches indeed. And yes, there's something to be cherished and spent all at once or not as a question. Do you happen to have any other tasty rocks with you? Tasty rocks, yes. This one is from Wales. It's a trilobite relative of crabs and lobsters. Again, about 400 million years old. Would you do the honors for us? Looking for rock. Yes. It's a mud rock. You can't see very much like this, but when you lick it, you just begin to see grains of silt and the shape they are and how they're arranged and so on. Of course, if it's a rainy day, you don't need to do that. So quite often in the field of Wales, there are days when you don't have to lick rocks, but on dry days, that's the standard repertoire. Well, we know from you that geologists like to lick rocks, which is started out as a chemist. Do chemists in general like to lick rocks? I started as a chemist of no. You never acquired the taste. I never acquired the taste. I never found one that tasted good. Meet Giovanni Odrino. He was a much more cheerful man than he looks here. And he didn't mind getting his boots dirty. He became a geologist even before such a thing really existed. A challenging handwriting, but this interpretation of his local Italian mountains is the evolutionary beginning of the modern geological timescale. How did he tell the rocks and minerals apart, though, with no fancy machines to help him? Well, his letters show that he used all his senses, including developing a taste for rocks. Ashes from a Shelley mudstone, he said, taste like fire and leave a certain sweetness and a skin tongue. And the mineral marcosite had an acid-spicy flavour like the acidity of wine. It was a kind of mineral taxonomy of taste, an ancestor of geochemistry. Giovanni Odrino reminds us how to do science from scratch. One suspects, therefore, that he must have liked cats. The literature prize. The winners are from France, the UK, Malaysia, and Finland. The literature prize is awarded to Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turinan, Irina Baharan, and Akira O'Connor. For studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many times. The prize will be awarded to them by Nobel laureate Al Roth. I have to say I've never seen a paper like this before. And I say congratulations and congratulations and congratulations and congratulations and congratulations here. This is your prize. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And also you get $10 trillion and here it is. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you. I think I've experienced both deja vu and jamae vu, but I've never heard of jamae vu before. Perhaps jamae vu is particularly interesting, but perhaps that's something to look into next as it's the erroneous sensation that you have solved something, an illusory feeling of insight. And I hope that sensation all the time before the referees get back to me. Absolutely. So I mean, when you talk to scientists, they always say, oh yeah, I've had that in the middle of the night. You wake up in the middle of the night, you've had the idea that's going to win you a prize, Ig Nobel or Nobel. And then you look at it in the morning, what you've written down in the middle of the night, it's absolutely nonsense and that's my career. Wow. Akira and Chris, I'd like to ask you to do something if you're comfortable doing it. Could you together repeat many times the word the the in sinks pretty Yes." in synchrony. As best you can. OK. We'll find a rhythm. We will. The, the, the, the, the... The, the, the, the, the, the, the. The, the, the, the, the, the. Da, dah, dah, da, da, da... Dava Learn Dava Dava Dav wonders Dava Dava Dava Dava Dava Dava Dava Dav Dava Dava Dava The induction of Jamais Vu in the laboratory word alienation and semantic satiation was an article conceived at the University of Leeds. A team effort we would like to thank the staff and students of the University of St. Andrews, Leeds University and University of Grenoble Alps. The Mechanical Engineering Prize. The winners are from India, China, Malaysia and the USA. The Mechanical Engineering Prize is awarded to Teefei Yap, Zhen Liu, Anup Rajapan, Trevor Shimakusu and Daniel Preston for reanimating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools. The prize will be presented to them by Nobel Laureate Barry Sharpless. Well, hearty congratulations and I'm delighted that two of you are MIT PhDs. It's one of my favorite places. You say in the paper, you say that one of the possible uses for this, these necrobots would be to go into natural environments and inspect things and look around. I can't imagine anything scary. Wolf spider come down next to me. I mean, this seems a little bit hard to... Did you meet you serious about other animals won't mind wolf spiders coming down next to them? I think they're small enough. The other animals probably wouldn't mind them in a while, I guess. Okay, but I became frightened of spiders when I was a child. My father came back from the Pacific in the 40s and we stayed for half a year in Khorna Del Mar and there were tarantulas all over the one time. I got so frightened of tarantulas. Spider's the only thing in the world I'm afraid of. So I've lived your adventures with trepidation. So who gets credit for coming up with necrobotics? Maybe a joint effort. Thank you. Through around a few different names for this area of research and this is the one that's stuck. We appreciate. Thank you. And let's not forget you have a $10 trillion bill coming your way. I give them the prize yet. I'm gonna do that retroactively. Have you ever seen a dead spider and wondered why its legs curl up? We did. And the answer led to us repurposing a dead spider as a robotic gripper. Humans have antagonistic muscle pairs like the biceps and triceps which flex and extend the elbow joint. However, while spiders have flexor muscles to curl their legs inward, they rely on hydraulic pressure to extend their legs outward, which is why they curl up after they die. Starting with a dead spider, we tapped into its hydraulic system with a needle and used pressure to extend its legs. It ended up looking like a claw machine. We call this approach necrobotics based on the source material of dead spider, hence Necro, and the application of robotic gripper. Using the necrobotic gripper, we picked up delicate objects as well as objects heavier than the gripper itself. Because nature creates these dexterous grippers for us, necrobotic components are easy to attain. We hope that this new feel of necrobotics will inspire curiosity driven research and spark ideas for how we can respectfully and sustainably use biotic materials for robotics applications. Now get set for the 24-7 lectures. We have invited several of the world's top thinkers to tell us very briefly what they're thinking about. Each 24-7 lecturer will explain their subject twice. First, a complete technical description in 24 seconds. Then, after a brief pause, a clear summary that anyone can understand in seven words. The 24-second time limit will be enforced by various means. This 24-7 lecture will be delivered by Erica Johnson, hydro-dynamicist and research associate at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Her topic, hydro-dynamics. First, a complete technical description of the subject in 24 seconds. On your mark, get set, go. Hydro-dynamics is the study of liquids in motion. Its foundational axioms include the conservation of mass momentum and energy, which state that in a closed fluidic system, the aforementioned quantities must remain constant over time. Under certain fluidic conditions, the governing equations can reduce to a number of well-known equations such as the Euler for newly and the Navier-Stokes equation. When taken together, they describe, for example, how fluids move in rivers, pipes, and around airplane. And now a clear summary that anyone can understand in seven words. On your mark, get set, go. Liquid flow in response to natural forces. This 24-7 lecture will be delivered by David Hu, professor of mechanical engineering and of biology at Georgia Tech. And he's winner of two Ig Nobel physics prizes. The first for his research on urination duration. The second for his research on why wombats make cube-shaped poo. The topic of his 24-7 lecture, water in the human body. First, a complete technical description of the subject in 24 seconds. On your mark, get set, go. An adult human consumes eight cups of food and drink per day. Why do we need so much water? Water is needed so your organs can produce liquids. Chewing food generates six cups of saliva per day. The stomach adds six cups of gastric secretions, including acid for digestion and mucous for protection. The liver adds four cups of greenage bile to help digest fats and stimulates peristalsis. The pancreas proves four cups of digestive enzymes. The small and large intestines add eight cups of secretions and one cup of mucous. That leaves just half a cup of disease. And now a clear summary that anyone can understand in seven words. On your mark, get set, go. Your organs make and absorb water constantly. Every year the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony includes the premiere of a mini opera, but this year we have a different kind of musical treat. The world premiere of a mini non opera. There will be four songs, plus or minus zero, about water. Here is the first song. You may think that I sound pretty squalid when I speak of my dear darling child. When I say she's not completely solid, you may say my speech sounds pretty wise. The news is aged. I see why that is just. Here is from South Korea and the USA. The public health prize is awarded to Sungmin Park for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies, including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete. The prize will be presented by Nobel laureate Ardham Patapoutian. Congratulations. I have a very special prize for you. Let me congratulate you on dropping lots of knowledge, making a huge mark on science, and creating a golden opportunity to human health with your free flowing ideas. Here's a beautiful prize. There you go. It's heavy. This is heavy. This is really meaningful. Thank you so much. It is my great honor and pleasure to have this from the Nobel laureate Ardham. Thank you so much. I think we have a very exciting moment here that we can analyze human excrete every time you go to the bathroom. This is really a golden opportunity to look at your health every time you go over there. I want to say don't waste your waste. Thank you. Before we forget, here's your ten trillion dollar bill. That's this. This is such a meaningful and exciting. Thank you so much. I'll have it. I'll keep it in my mind. Thank you. Yes. It's such a brilliant idea because we spend so much time analyzing what you eat, how much you eat, nutrition, etc. What comes out, of course, is very important because it tells you what's happening in between. This is very special for me, my first Ig Nobel presentation. I've actually published both in Euronation and number one and number two in the last years from the Meccano sensation point of view. This is very special to me. Where are you with respect to making this actually be used in the field? Is this someone actually using it? I assume there are some privacy concerns, especially you have a camera in there. I would think some people would mind that. Our sensor is almost like a perfectly passive, which means you don't have to do a thing. You just do defecation and nutrition, we analyze it. That actually caused lots of problems, privacy problem, because we're collecting all the data. My name is Dr. Sengmin Park, and I'm honored to be standing here. I write on a toilet to accept this year's Ig Nobel Prize. I'd like to dedicate this award to my late mentor, Professor Sanjeev Sangein Beer. I'm not alone in this, of course. We've all heard about Bill Gates' interest in toilets, but Bill, I believe you're missing a critical element. Our toilet can do more than keep us clean. They can keep us healthy. So here's my shout out to you. Let's transform hygiene into healthcare, because the ultimate goal of hygiene is effective healthcare. Thank you all for this honor and remember, don't waste your waste. The communication prize. The winners are affiliated with Argentina, Spain, Colombia, Chile, China, and the USA. The communication prize is awarded to Maria José Torres Priores, Diana Lopez Barroso, Estela Camara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sadeño, Augustine Ibanez, Marcello Bertier, and Adolfo Garcia for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward. The prize will be presented to them by Nobel laureate Esther Duflo. Thank you so much. This is an honor. Thank you. Thank you very much. We couldn't be more happy and excited about this. Well, maybe you could, because you're also getting a ten trillion dollar bill. Now we're talking. Yes. Well, first of all, congratulations. There is a long tradition of speaking backwards in France. And I was wondering whether you were considering expanding your sample to France, because in fact it is something that people speak between themselves. It is even as a name, it's called Verlan. Although we tend to go syllable by syllable, which seems to be much easier than going phonemes by phonemes. So in France, the backward speaking has some feature of somewhat rebellious type of situation. It's something young people speak between themselves. Strangely enough, sometimes words are first pronounced backwards, like Arab becomes Beurre, which tends to become Rebeux, which is the Verlan of the Verlan, which doesn't actually fall back on its feet. Some of the words have just made their way in the typical language. For example, thank you is French and is a merci in French, but I almost always say cimer to say merci, which I think is not associated with any particular outstanding activity in any part of my of my brain. But yeah, so the world I've come up and some people are more adept than other, but I think it is for most people seem to be a skill that people have learned over time, like you learn a language. That's fascinating and it really resonates with us. We're both from Argentina and we have our own particular version of this backwards speech in French, which is called l'un faradot. It's quite the same thing. You typically go syllable by syllable and it was also quite prominent in prison speech. Many of the jargon that is actually part of our daily language nowadays was sort of hatched in those environments. The interesting thing is that it's also somewhat different from the specific phenomenon that we studied in the sense that these people, they invert their language sound by sound and they can do it actually at the level of a full sentence or something longer than that. Here in Spain we also have a town in Canary Island where they speak backward and they so it would be like it's a it's not that unusual but uh what we found to be unusual it was like the what Adolfo was saying it would be could reverse pretty long sentences so this was quite unusual. The first quote in Bahrain Now, don't call a shrink just yet. We are simply using backward speech. Take a look. Thank you for this fun award. We are happy to accept it. Backward speech is a window into the mechanisms our brains use to arrange phonemes, the building blocks of speech. We found that expertise in backward speech involved distinct patterns in brain pathways supporting phonological and visual operations. So this study uses unusual speech to understand key mechanisms of normal speech. And we are thrilled to crown it with this fantastic award. Thank you. With nothing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The Medicine Prize. The winners are from the USA, Canada, Macedonia, Iran, and Vietnam. The Medicine Prize is awarded to Christine Pham, Bobac Hediati, Kiana Hashemi. Wave as as I mentioned your name please. Tiana Mamagani, Ella Chuka, Margit Yuhas, and Natasha Maschinskowska for using cadavers to explore whether there's an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils. The prize will be presented to them by Nobel Laureate Eric Maskin. How could I know that the nose could be so notable? Congratulations. Thank you. And here is your 10 trillion dollar bill. May I ask how you got into such a hairy subject? So I'm going to take this one. We study actually hair loss, alopecia, conditions where people lose all of their hair on the body. And one of the sites where they don't have hair is the nose. And nose hairs are important in preventing the body from getting sick. So do these patients have higher risk for getting sick? And why? And we went through all the textbooks. We really couldn't find anything. Now where the hairs are? Do they go this far? Do they go this far? How long are they? Are they black? So we were like we have to figure this out. But you were also interested in comparing hairs in the two nostrils. Does that have a scientific implication? So everything in the body is asymmetric as well, right? And as we went on the exploration we wanted to know. Because some of our patients had only one side gone so we didn't know if that's something that was unique to the condition or that was something that was inherent to all of us. And in most cases, is it the left or the right that predominates? So I will leave that to the people that did this on the ground. So Christine, Kiana. Yeah, so it's honestly like very different per person. We counted about like 20 nose hairs and everyone would have like some variety. And I would say like with like the mean about there were about 120 nose hairs on the left nostril then 112 for the mean nose hairs on the right. So maybe the left predominated a little bit for this study. And do you have a theory which explains this scrapping say? So actually it was non-significant the difference between them. So ultimately I feel like it's kind of the same amount of nose hairs in each nostril just variating by a couple of nose hairs. Good morning Kiki. How are you? Sorry I'm so underdressed. I just flew in town last night. I'm sitting across from this billionaire who had these striking nose hairs. And you know what occurred? Who doesn't have any nose hairs? Are all patient patients? No I didn't know that. What are your nose hairs for? That's a very good question. I look to all the anatomy books. Not a single thing on nose hair. We need to study this. Sure, that sounds reasonable on cadavers. Okay, thank you. Okay, that's what we did. We studied nose hairs in 20 cadavers and found that there were about 112 to 120 nose hairs in each one of these nostrils. So we also found that the hairs tended to grow mainly in the frontal location of the nose and essentially only grew up to about one centimeter inwards. This supports its presumed role as a protected barrier from environmental exposure as particles theoretically deposit more on hairs in the front nostril than along deeper passages. We hope this research raises awareness of the importance of nasal hairs, especially in our alopecia areata patients in which their loss results in an increased risk of allergies and infection. So thank you for this nose-worthy award. This 24-7 lecture will be delivered by Jasmine Nerode, assistant professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago. Her topic, geckos running on water. First, a complete technical description of the subject in 24 seconds. On your mark, get set, go. Geckos living in places with the monsoon season have to move quickly on both land and water. Anyone who has swam or done water aerobics knows that water provides much more resistance than air. So these geckos need to sort out a way to keep most of their body above the water surface. Geckos slap the water to create air bubbles to walk along, but they cannot slap as hard as other bigger water walkers and need a little bit of extra help. This help comes from their bellies which are water repellent and let them use surface tension for an extra boost. And now a clear summary that anyone can understand in seven words. On your mark, get set, go. Geckos bellies help them walk on water. This 24-7 lecture will be delivered by Nadia Domenici, Alberto Minetti, and Yuri Ivanenko. They and their team were awarded the 2013 Ig Nobel Physics Prize for discovering that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond if those people and that pond were on the moon. Their topic, running on water on the moon. First, a complete technical description of the subject in 24 seconds. On your mark, get set, go. On the earth, some lizards and birds may run on water. Humans are too heavy for that. Although supported by a theoretical model, our experiments in emulated moon gravity show that running on water helped to be smaller things is feasible. The performance lasted about 10 seconds. But on the real moon, water cavity is around the feet look so more slowly, making it easier to run. The next theorem fits. And now a clear summary that anyone can understand in seven words. On your mark, get set, go. Running on. Lunar water. Yes, we can. It's time for the second song in our mini non opera about water. Please enjoy this brief intermission. We hope you enjoyed this brief intermission. The second airplane toss is about to begin. Safety first. Airplanes launch in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. You may not be aware that the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony has essentially no funding. So we invite you, yes you, dear friend, to donate a little money or a lot or a gigantic amount if you want. Help us keep the Ig Nobel Prizes alive and well for next year and into the future. Donate. Donate at our website improbable.com. Thank you. Thank you. And now the nutrition prize. Winners are from Japan. The Ig Nobel nutrition prize is awarded to Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food. The prize will be presented by Nobel Laureate Peter Dardie. Congratulations. I am truly delighted to be asked to award this prize. This is clearly a breakthrough piece of work that sets the stage for enormous development and great commercial application in the future and also could add to our general delight in life and our sense of happiness. So what better prize could possibly be awarded and it now remains for me to pass this prestigious award to you. Thank you so much. Thank you. And here also is your ten trillion dollar bill. We made many tableware like spoons or bowls and Hiromi has a kind of tableware of folks. Yeah and as for me it will be it is being commercialized and will be launched this year perhaps. And can I talk? Please. Say an electric test also contributes to creation new taste experience I think. For example I already have found a method to manipulate the position where the taste sensation is induced and I can move the taste using electricity. So I think we'll all be watching in restaurants to see whether people are moving their utensils around to get this enhanced taste and we'll be looking for that signature white handle to see whether it's permeated into our social environment. Yeah I'd like to ask a question to all of you. Have you ever tried to leak the battery? You know especially nine volt batteries. So yeah you did. All the all the time when I'm putting it in equipment whether it's a light battery or not. Okay. And if it doesn't spark I throw it out yeah. I know the sensation same here. And also my my father worked early on as a telephone mechanic and we had hand crank generators. So various electrical shocks in various sites were administered as a child. I see. Not always pleasant. Yeah I'm very happy to hear that because basically our our research starts that kind of experience I think. Yes. Yeah. So you know it enhances the saltiness. You know for example the low sodium food is good for health but not so delicious. So by enhancing the saltiness of that we can eat you know that low sodium food feeling so salty maybe salty as normal food. I guess our approach can assist us in balancing our wellness and health the reason is that electric taste is a test with no nutritional value. Not to receive this award and appreciate everyone who has supported this research. The purpose of this paper is to use electrical stimulation for augmenting taste in eating and drinking. The main contribution of this paper is proposing a tableware type stimulation device that changes the taste of food and drinks. Not only for electrical stimulation we hope that research on eating augmentation technology will grow in the field of HCI. And we have subsequently demonstrated that it can increase the saltiness of food and found that it has the potential to contribute to health and it is being commercialized and will be launched this year under the name electric salt. And also I'm expanding my research to include taste displays that reproduce taste even remotely. And I call these taste media. So please stay tuned for further developments. Thank you very much. The education prize winners are from Hong Kong. The winners are from Hong Kong, the UK, the Netherlands, Ireland, the USA, and Japan. The education prize is awarded to Katie Tam, Sayania Hoon, Victoria Huay, Wynand Van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Jiji Yuan, and Christian Chan for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students. The prize will be handed to them by Nobel Laureate Marty Chalfee. Well, congratulations. This is a very well-earned prize. I read with great interest the first couple of sentences of your papers. It was a little hard to get through to the end, I must admit. I have a lot of questions. I've just, the main one I wanted to ask you was the students in one of the studies were asked to rate the boredom of their teachers and how bored they were for a couple of weeks. And I wondered, did they get bored with the study as you proceeded through the two weeks? And more importantly, did you? Yeah. And we can't get enough of it. That's why I keep doing it. Terrific. Well, with that, let me not prolong this anymore, become more boring myself, and award you all this ignoble prize. Congratulations. Thank you. Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. And also your $10 trillion bill. Thank you very much. We made it. Now we can quit. We have our, we really want to have the motivated students in our classes, the ones that really want to learn. But then there are some that are not quite as motivated. I was wondering if we gave the first lecture, and instead of trying to be as inviting as we could attract people into the class, we were as boring as we possibly could to be able to weed out the ones that said, oh no, this is not for me. So have you tried that? Yeah, it is those who can withstand boredom who tend to show up. But then again, you know, in science, we probably want also some people who are, who are finding it difficult to deal with boredom, right, who need that stimulation and search and things like that. Probably a combination of students that are easily bored and not so easily bored, at least for science would be the best situation. Please stop. I'm bored. Please stop. I'm bored. Okay, we get it. Ms. Sweetie Poole is bored. But why? And that is a very serious empirical question, at least to my collaborators, Katie Tam at University of Toronto and Violent Van Tuberk at University of Xx. Two papers were cited by the award committee. The first one suggests that we are bored because we expect to be so. We demonstrate that our expectations walking into the classroom can influence the extent of our boredom. In other words, if you expect to be bored by me, chances are you already are. I'm bored. In the second paper, we looked at how teachers boredom affect their students. We found that if the students thought their teachers were bored while teaching, they too felt more bored, which in turn made them less motivated to study. On behalf of Katie, Violent and our teams, we thank the teachers and students who participated in our studies. We also thank Mark and the award committee for overcoming their own boredom by creating this award that makes us laugh, then think. Please stop. I'm bored. And now, it's time for the third and final airplane toss. Airplanes loaded. Launching in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, go! The Psychology Prize. The winners are from the USA. The Psychology Prize is awarded to Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Burkowitz for experiments on a city street to see how many passers by stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward. The prize will be presented by Nobel Laureate Francis Arnold. This insightful work helps us to understand ourselves and predict our collective behavior. Honestly, I think it's the most important contribution since monkeys see monkey do, which left so much unexplained. So I'm delighted to present you this Ig Nobel Prize. Thank you. And of course you also get a ten trillion dollar bill and here it is. Wow. Now this is something I'm overwhelmed. We can see that in your face. I'm very telling. I just want to go out and try this experiment. I'm going to get some of my students who need to get some sunshine and we're going to go out and try this. But what if everybody's just looking at their cell phones? Well, since the study was done in 1968, I didn't worry about that. Thank you for this award. To senior author on this publication Stanley Milgram is a world famous for the studies he did on obedience. Unfortunately, he passed away at the age of 51 in 1984. I was one of his first advisees in a seminar with 17 students in 1968 when we did this study. We looked at the relationship between the size of a crowd ranging from one to 15 composed of members of the seminar. We were standing on 42nd Street, Manhattan looking up at a building that then held the City University Graduate Center. We filmed the reaction of the crowd on from the sixth floor as a size of the stimulus crowd was increased a greater proportion of passes by adopted the behavior of the crowd. With one stimulus person, four percent stopped and looked up while with 15, 40 percent did so. This publication has been cited over seven hundred times with a dozen times in just the last few months. The Physics Prize The winners are from Spain, Galicia, Switzerland, France, and the UK. The Physics Prize is awarded to Bietto Fernandez Castro, Marianne Peña, Enrique Noguera, Miguel Gilcote, Esperanza Brulón, Antonio Comasania, Damien Bouffard, Alberto Navarra, Garabato, and Beatriz Moreno Carvalido for measuring the extent to which ocean water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies. The prize will be presented to them by Nobel laureate Wolfgang Ketterler. So I assume that's the big moment now. I hope you're all aware of your extraordinary accomplishments and therefore I want to give you this prize. And also here is your ten trillion dollar bill. So the instrument is something which floats on the water and measures the motion of the water. It free-falls on the water and as it goes down it measures the motion of the water, perpendicular to the instrument. Okay, since your conclusion is that activities of fish really contribute to mixing of the water, does that now mean that some climate change models have to be modified because there's an additional amount of mixing? That's a tricky question. Alberto, do you want to answer that? I think this process might be important on coastal regions with lots of fish. We don't think that it's necessarily important on a global scale in the open ocean but when you're talking about coastal regions, if you have models that are trying to reproduce the behavior of those coastal regions, then once you think about about this process for sure. And will there be any more detailed follow-up studies on this phenomenon? Nothing is just a friendly plan. I think that the contribution to the open ocean circulation, I'm still thinking it's kind of not a close question. There are animals moving up and down the water column every day from very deep to the surface and I think there is a consensus that it doesn't matter but I kind of don't believe it because people used to think also that it doesn't matter even in the coastal ocean and we showed that it happened so we should think of reassessing this perhaps. It's a challenging test. Wouldn't it be beautiful if we had to put whales in climate models? That is fantastic. I mean I hope that's very important. So well, I wish you well and I hope with this additional popularity and fame you will have no problems to receive funding for your future work. Well, I have 10 trillion dollars so I think it'll be fine. Yeah, we don't need any more funding right? I think what you have studied is different namely the anchovies are the real source of some mixing and turbulence. Yeah, it seems that their effect doesn't propagate to a larger scale when it dies. Yeah, or it just keeps the balance in an unpredictable, unstable system. Chaotic systems are unpredictable and because the solutions diverge for a small change in initial conditions and if the anchovy changes an initial condition that would mean later on the system can be behaved very, very differently. But it's more in a statistical way. Why should you care about anchovies having a sex? Turbulent mixing caused by windsome tides is key for the ocean, driving the global circulation and delivering nutrients to marine life. But what if fish while swimming also mix the ocean? Oceanographers used to think that fish are too small for that until... In summer 2018 of the Norway's Iberia Peninsula we observed strong turbulence for 15 nights. Intense acoustic signals and sampling nets full of tiny eggs revealed that this turbulence was caused by large segregation of mating anchovies. In the Nile frenzy, anchovies steer and mix the different water layers. Key to this extraordinary finding is that summer winds in this region raise cool deep waters very close to warm surface waters, allowing the libidinous little fish to mix them together. This 24-7 lecture will be delivered by Andrea Sella, Professor of Chemistry at University College London. His topic, medium density amorphous ice. First a complete technical description of the subject in 24 seconds. On your mark, get set, go! Ice floats, right? If solid state structure keeps the H2O molecules apart, lowering its density when it freezes. Can you smash this structure? Using a cryomil, a machine used to grind frozen salami, yeah don't ask, we saw the crystal structure fall apart. X-ray diffraction peaks vanished, calorimetry showed a huge exotherm, and the density, measured by our community, rose until it exactly matched that of liquid water. Green had made medium density amorphous ice. And now a clear summary that anyone can understand in seven words. On your mark, get set, go! Ultra cold, smashed ice, neither floats nor sinks. Now it's time for the third song in our mini non opera about water. Ice two, ice three, ice four, ice five, ice six, ice seven, ice eight, ice nine, ice ten. Makes sense of this substance called ice. It's not so simple, and that is not nice. Waters, such a simple molecule, is not. Ice is corollary, but it's amorphous. And timeists propose crazy new pairs. Such mysteries cannot easily be some time stay. Ice is me. The non opera performers, the water tonics orchestra, piano, Ivan Gusev, cello, Dr. Julie Ryman, accordion, Dr. Thomas Michelle, book, Alexi Eliseev, the soloist, Barbara Allen Hill, Scott Taylor, the portaborse, Michelle Leguari. Now Professor Jean Berco Gleason will deliver the traditional Ig Nobel. Goodbye, goodbye speech. Goodbye. Normally at this point we ask everyone in the ceremony to gather please at the front of the stage for a pointless photo opportunity. With the pandemic that's not possible, so instead here's a 10 second long look back at tonight's ceremony. We put this ceremony together with a lot of very knowledgeable people. Take a look at what they did. Here's a five second long look back at tonight's ceremony. If you'd like to help the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony continue, maybe for another 33 years, please donate a little money. And if you want to discover more things, things that make you laugh and then think, please subscribe to the magazine, The Annals of Improbable Research. You can do both those things at our website improbable.com. We hate to say goodbye, goodbye. So just before we finish, here is a one second long look back at the entire ceremony. We hope, we hope that next year the pandemic will have been tamed, damn it, and we can do the 34th first annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony with all of us back together in Sanders Theatre. Now on behalf of the Harvard Radcliffe Society of Physics students and the Harvard Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and especially from all of us at Improbable Research, please remember this final thought. If you didn't win an Ig Nobel Prize this year and especially if you did, better luck next year. Thank you. It went straight into my rubbish bin. It took a sudden right turn and right in.