Dung beetles that orient themselves using the Milky Way, how to run on water and the psychology of beer goggles. These were just some of the studies that scooped awards at the Ig Nobel prize ceremony on 12 September at Harvard University. The prizes, which are handed out each year by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research, honour research that makes you laugh, then think. We bring you the highlights from this year's awards.
A joint Ig Nobel prize in biology and astronomy went to Marcus Byrne at the University of the Witwatersrand and Clarke Scholtz of the University of Pretoria, both in South Africa, alongside Marie Dacke, Emily Baird and Eric Warrant of Lund University in Sweden, for their discovery that dung beetles use the Milky Way to orient themselves at night, published in Cell (vol 23, p 298).
As a person with no sense of direction, Dacke says she was "fascinated how well [the beetles] could find their way back to a tiny nest entrance or follow a set bearing". To see how the beetles managed such feats on dark, moonless nights, the researchers moved their experiments into a planetarium. They found the beetles were aligning their motion with the Milky Way, which they see as the brightest thing in the sky when there is no moon.
The physics prize went to Alberto Minetti at the University of Milan, Italy, and his colleagues Yuri Ivanenko, Germana Cappellini, Nadia Dominici and Francesco Lacquaniti for demonstrating that people could run on water in lunar gravity, which they reported in the journal PLoS One (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037300).
"Lizards and small birds are capable of running on the water surface on Earth for very short distances, and I was wondering whether there could be a gravity value at which humans could also do that," says Minetti.
His group scaled up a mathematical model of a lizard running on water to human dimensions. The model showed that a person running on water on Earth would need superhuman strength and feet a square metre each in size. In lunar gravity, however, which is about one-sixth as strong as Earth's, a mere mortal wearing diving fins on their feet might pull off the divine trick.
To test this, the group set up a hoist over a pool that bore most of the weight of a fin-equipped runner. Four of six volunteers were able to run for 10 seconds at simulated lunar gravity.
Music can soothe the soul, but what is the right kind of music for soothing a transplanted heart? Answering that question for a select population namely, mice earned the Ig Nobel prize in medicine for Tokyo medical researchers Masateru Uchiyama, Xiangyuan Jin, Qi Zhang, Toshihito Hirai, Atsushi Amano, Hisashi Bashuda and Masanori Niimi.
Curious to see if music could reduce the immune response that leads to transplant rejection, they transplanted hearts from one strain of mice to another, which normally causes lethal rejection.
In the Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery, they report that mice with mismatched hearts who listened to the Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden playing Verdi's La Traviata for seven days lived two to three times longer than those that listened to pure tones or "new age" music by Enya. The effects of heavy metal, techno and hip hop have yet to be determined.
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Opera therapy and beetle astronomy win Ig Nobel prizes
