Prizes Ig Nobel prize: rats with pants, eggs “descozinhados” and a scientist-goat – Vision

Ahmed Shafik died without seeing the award-winning the your effort you have spent hours in the dress pants 75 mice. The fabrics ranged – polyester, cotton-and wool – because the purpose of the study this doctor and sexologist of the University of Cairo was to evaluate the effect of clothing in sexual activity. In this case, in the mice; in the future, believed he in of the man.

Shafik had already discovered that the briefs polyester affected the fertility. Now, care to know if the other tissues could also cause the decrease of sperm production. The results of their research, which appeared for the first time in scientific publishing European Urology, showed that the rats that used pants polyester during a year acasalavam much less. Apparently, the polyester generated static electricity on the genital area.

Twenty-three years later, the egyptian, who died recently, received, posthumously, the Ig Nobel prize in the category Playback, in a ceremony that the journal Annals of Improbable Research organizes since 1991. Your study was worth a few good laughs this Thursday, the 22nd, in the auditorium of the University of Harvard, a constant throughout the presentation of the award winners of 2015.

Laugh and then think – this was the objective of Marc Abrahams, editor of the magazine, to the next with a joy the Nobel prizes. A goal that kept him at the 26.Th edition, the conclusion is to know, right to the head, that the Volkswagen has the winnerthe in the category Chemistry, to try to resolve the problem of excess emissions from programming the car engines produce less pollutants in the conditions of testing in the factory.

This will have been the prize the more controversial. All other studies are just absurd. Which will have passed by the head of the british designer Thomas Thwaites to build prosthetics for legs and arms, and live among the goats, an experience recounted in his book GoatMan: How I Took Holiday from Being Human (man-goat: how I took vacation to be a human)?

Thwaites received the Ig Nobel prize for Biology in ex-aequo with the veterinarian and writer Charles Foster, who, he too, decided to live like a badger, a deer, a fox and a few more animals, and writing a book (Being the Beast, or is Being an animal). Despite the coincidence, it appears that we have found with the man-goat.

The prize for Literature went straight to Fredrik Sjoberg, an entomologist Swedish collected dead flies and flies almost dead on a remote island, and reported to experience "pleasure" in his memoirs, a trilogy to which it gave the title of The Trap to the Flies. And the Psychology went to a group of researchers that chose to make a study about the lie asking the 1 005 people, between 6 and 77 years, how many times they had lied in the past 24 hours. As is obvious, were not to know if the answers were true, but even so, they published the results in Acta Psychologica in 2015.

In category Medicine, a team from the University of Luebeck in Germany, proved that we were able to relieve the itching on the right arm if coçarmos the left. The research included a histamine injected in twenty volunteers, mirrors and videos. The volunteers were deceived by the paraphernalia of accessories, and the truth is that the sensation of itching has decreased relatively.

The list of winners looks like a collection of anecdotes. The american Michael Smith was voluntarily stung by bees at 25 locations of your body to determine the most painful (nostrils, upper lip, and penis) and less painful (the skull, the tip of the ring finger, and arm). The canadian Diallah Karim was able to determine that the pain experienced when passing a hump diagnose an acute appendicitis. And the austrian Elizabeth Oberzaucher have chosen the mathematical techniques ideal to find out if the sultan Mulai Ismail of Morocco has produced the same 888 children between 1679 and 1727.

But there is more to make us laugh, as the recipe chemistry invented by the american Tom Yuan and the australian Callum Ormonde to "descozinhar" eggs part, or the conclusion of the taiwanese Patricia Yang that almost all of the mammals empty the bladder during 21 seconds.

The Dutch Mark Dingemanse found that the word "huh?" (or their equivalent) exist in all languages, but still without knowing why. By the end, you really feel like to say "dah" when we read that the chilean Bruno Grossei spent hours to complete that a chicken with a stick stuck in the ass walks like a dinosaur.