56 | New Scientist | 26 September 2020
The back pages Feedback at the Ig Nobels
“Everybody has won, and all
must have prizes.” Feedback
subscribes fully to the Dodo’s
verdict on the Caucus race in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Equally, however, some have
won more than others, and
they must have further prizes.
From this angle, we approach,
gingerly, the scientific world’s top
looking-glass awards, the Ig Nobels.
Now in their 30th year, the prizes
for “achievements that first make
people laugh, and then think”
were announced last week in a
ceremony all the more glittering
for being held entirely in the pixels
of the internet.
Feedback attended the virtual
red carpet, slightly faded and
bearing a couple of nasty stains
(the carpet, that is).Bite worse than bark
This year’s acoustics prize was
awarded for inducing a female
Chinese alligator to bellow in
an airtight chamber filled with
helium-enriched air.
Crocodilians are among the most
vocal non-avian reptiles, notes the
team from Austria, Japan and an
alligator farm in Florida, deftly
sidestepping the scaly question
of how one accurately defines
a reptile (see page 49 for a
full-frontal assault on that).
There remains, however,
the delicate matter of what the
loud bellows they produce, which
are particularly frequent during
the mating season, are for. Is their
purpose – and we hesitate to say
the word – sexual in any way?
By demonstrating the presence
of “formant” frequencies created by
the shape of the vocal tract, which
are increased by breathing helium,
the researchers suggest yes: the
calls may advertise an appropriate
body size to potential mates.
Feedback applauds the integrity
of those behind the work, who
return triumphantly with these new
insights from the crocodilian interior.
Simultaneously, we surreptitiously
add an entry to “mating and dating
strategies” in the relevant place in
our extensive piling system.but unequal British apparently kiss
compared with the French, whose
égalité seems to exceed both their
liberté and their fraternité. All in all,
though, we can only recommend
the allaying of mutual economic
insecurity as an excuse for
anyone caught in flagrante.Nails on board
The award for medicine went to a
team at the University of Amsterdam
in the Netherlands for adding a new
term to the manual of psychiatric
conditions: misophonia, or an
impulsive and aggressive response
to annoying sounds made by fellow
humans. Team member Damiaan
Denys was first moved to propose
it after treating someone who
became aggressive whenever
she heard someone sneeze. “It
was spring and I suffer from hay
fever, so I was very tense during
the diagnostic interview,” he says.A less extreme version of getting
annoyed by annoying sounds, and
the possibly annoying people who
make them, is a human near-
universal. So, at least, Feedback’s
banishment to the stationery
cupboard would suggest. Denys and
his colleagues have since developed
a therapy programme that involves
mixing annoying sounds with ones
that evoke pleasant responses,
which has a success rate in soothing
frayed nerves of over 50 per cent.
Our colleagues should please note.The worm turned
What happens to an earthworm
when you vibrate it at a very high
frequency? The answer, according
to the recipients of this year’s
physics prize, is that its entire
body adopts a standing wave
form known as a Faraday wave.
Ivan Maksymov and Andriy
Pototsky at Swinburne University
of Technology in Melbourne note
that this happens because “it is
plausible to consider the worm
to be a liquid drop enclosed by
a thin elastic skin”.
Feedback applauds this
significant step closer to that
holy grail of physics, a model
organism that actually conforms
to equations. Move over,
spherical cows in a vacuum.The eyebrows have it
Finally, visibly moved by her success
is Miranda Giacomin at MacEwan
University in Edmonton, Canada.
She and Nicholas Rule at the
University of Toronto won the
psychology award for devising
a method to identify narcissists
through their distinctive eyebrows.
The research was very data-
driven, she explains: they looked
for facial cues that seemed to
predict narcissism and, “after
systematically breaking down the
components of the face, the data
led us to the eyebrows”, she says.
Feedback makes no comment,
and merely raises one of our
distinct, shapely and quite frankly
glorious pair. More Ig Nobels the
same time next year, possibly. ❚Kiss ‘n’ tell
Speaking of which, the economics
prize went to a group of researchers
from Australia, Brazil, Chile,
Colombia, France, Poland and
the UK for trying to quantify the
relationship between different
countries’ national income
inequality and the average amount
of mouth-to-mouth kissing.
They found that the two
were locked in a passionate
embrace: the higher a nation’s
Gini coefficient, a measure of
economic inequality, the higher
its self-reported kissing frequency.
Team member Christopher
Watkins was unsurprised by the
result, as all sorts of research
points to a committed partner
being seen as more important
when resources are tight.
Nevertheless, certain facets of
the work puzzle Feedback, such as
the fervour with which the frigidGot a story for Feedback?
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