Everyone who had to read a notary or a contract as a layperson will have asked himself: Why are such texts so difficult to understand? Eric Martínez, Edward Gibson, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Francis Mollica from the University of Edinburgh analyzed this using ten million words and published corresponding fonts and published this in the journal »Cognition«. The result: »Compared to nine other basic genres of the written and spoken English, an astonishingly high proportion of certain characteristics, such as rare technical terms, contain clauses embedded in the middle (which leads to syntactic dependencies over large lengths), Passive structures and non-standard capitalization. ”It remains unclear whether the layperson understand better, but for the jury of the IG Nobel Prize, this publication is clearly worth price in the category» Literature «.
The prize has now been awarded for the 32nd time, and as always, the members of the committee often chose publications that received too little attention in everyday life with a wink: "Every winner (or every winning team) has done something that first makes people laugh and then think," the jury writes on its homepage.
The "Prize for Applied Cardiology", for example, goes to Eliska Prochazkova from the University of Leiden and her team for work that could be of great importance for lovers. As you write in "Nature Human Behavior", the heartbeat seems to be synchronized quickly in humans when they meet for the first time and then find each other immediately.
Frank Fish of West Chester University and Zhiming Yuan of the University of Strathclyde, on the other hand, have taken a liking to ducklings. The fluffy offspring of waterfowl usually follow the mother in a relatively ordered row and not in wild chaos. And the reason for this is physics: the mother swimming forward causes a bow wave as well as vortices behind her stern, which the chicks behind take advantage of. "By riding on the waves generated by the mother duck, the following duckling can achieve a significant reduction in wave resistance. When a duckling swims directly behind its mother, a destructive wave interference phenomenon occurs, and the duckling's wave impedance becomes positive, driving the duckling forward. What's even more interesting is that the rest of the ducklings in a single-row formation can retain this edge of surfing," Yuan and Co. write.
The Biology award went to Solimary García-Hernández and Glauco Machadou from the Universidade de São Paulo for their publication in "Integrative Zoology" on the potentially complicated love life of Scorpions. If predators attack the invertebrates, they try to defend themselves with their poisonous sting at the tail end. But sometimes they also throw it off directly with a large part of the complete tail to irritate the opponent: a behavior called autotomy. This is accompanied by a weight loss of a quarter of the body mass; at the same time, the animals reject a large part of the digestive tract including the anus. This leads to blockages, which, however, disturb the Scorpions little. Although the males are mainly slowing down, they have enough time to find a female partner and mate with her without any problems.
Some may have already wondered why he or she is so successful at work, although other members of the team would actually be more talented. Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo and Andrea Rapisarda from the University of Catania have at least one possible answer, as their paper in "Advances in Complex Systems" indicates :: According to their model, pure happiness explains a good part of the professional or social advancement of many people .
The elk test is still driving on the forehead of some carmaker. At the original event, the car did not even collide with this animal. In Scandinavian countries or Canada, however, fatal accidents with the participation of the large deer are common. Magnus Gens from the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute therefore killed the question of how to better arm vehicles against such collisions without having to sacrifice real moose. For his thesis, he designed an eleven crash test dummy that showed excellent results.
The IG Nobel Prize for Peace finally went to Junhui Wu from the University of Utrecht and Co: The team developed an algorithm that helps gossip bases to help when they lie and when they better say the truth.
