Rat sperm and rocks with personalities that dazzle

Party hats were donned, plastic beakers full of wine were quaffed and hearty cheers were bellowed. It was most definitely party time here on the Science Lite desk a few weeks back – for it was the most important time of our year – the Ig Nobels.

It is our Christmas, birthday and Eurovision all rolled into one. So much more than a mere sardonic finger wag at the apparently ridiculous, the Igs celebrate scientific originality and curiosity in their most spectacular forms. First make them laugh, then make them think – so goes the mantra of the Ig Nobels – and as the detritus of our celebration begins to clear, it is time to take you through some of this year’s victors and allow you to do just that.

First up – the Reproduction Prize. A new category for this year’s awards, and the spoils went to the late Ahmed Shafik, for…well, for his complete dedication to all things trouser-based. Over the course of two papers he studied the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of the wearers. The really amazing part here is that the first paper involved no humans. Published in European Urology, “Effect of Different Types of Textiles on Sexual Activity. Experimental study,” looked at the effect of trouser wearing on the sexual behaviour of rats. You won’t, perhaps, be surprised to learn that polyester trousers are a real turn-off for rats…

And for humans – well, in his second paper Shafik wanted to test, and we are quoting here, ‘the effect of a polyester sling applied to the scrotum’. Which he did – on no less than 14 men. It turns out that the electrostatic charge created between the polyester and the scrotal skin was so high that it actually killed sperm cells. Meaning something as innocent sounding as ‘polyester sling’ could be considered as an electronic sperm-death laser. As such, Shafik concludes that they could be a safe, reversible and inexpensive method of contraception in men. Which sounds promising…although not, perhaps, if marketed using the slogan ‘electronic sperm-death laser’.

Speaking of marketing. The Economics Prize went to Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson, for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks…from a sales and marketing perspective. It turns out that marketing types are a tad worried that a scale they use to indicate ‘brand personality’ might be…well, nonsense. In an attempt to show that you could use the Akers Brand Personality Scale to assign ‘personality’ to any old thing – Avis and the team examined the personality of rocks. They found that yes, indeed you could. And if all this sounds like frivolous nonsense to you well that is just soooo granite – perhaps you should try being more open and accepting ...like limestone.

Best of the rest - the 2016 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

PHYSICS PRIZE - Gábor Horváth, Miklós Blahó, György Kriska, Ramón Hegedüs, Balázs Gerics, Róbert Farkas, Susanne Åkesson, Péter Malik, and Hansruedi Wildermuth, for discovering why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses, and for discovering why dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE - Volkswagen, for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested.

MEDICINE PRIZE - Christoph Helmchen, Carina Palzer, Thomas Münte, Silke Anders, and Andreas Sprenger, for discovering that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body (and vice versa).

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE - Evelyne Debey, Maarten De Schryver, Gordon Logan, Kristina Suchotzki, and Bruno Verschuere, for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers.

BIOLOGY PRIZE - Awarded jointly to Charles Foster, for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and to Thomas Thwaites, for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming hills in the company of, goats.

PERCEPTION PRIZE - Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs.