From cyborg spiders to licking rocks, here's what topped this year's Ig Nobels for weirdest scientific feats
The 33rd annual prize ceremony was a prerecorded online event, as it has been since the coronavirus pandemic, instead of the past live ceremonies at Harvard UniversityCounting nose hairs in cadavers, repurposing dead spiders and explaining why scientists lick rocks, are among the winning achievements in this year's Ig Nobels, the prize forThe 33rd annual prize ceremony was a prerecorded online event, as it has been since the coronavirus pandemic, instead of the past live ceremonies at...
Among the winners was Jan Zalasiewicz of Poland who earned the chemistry and geology prize for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks. “Licking the rock, of course, is part of the geologist’s and palaeontologist’s armoury of tried-and-much-tested techniques used to help survive in the field,” Zalasiewicz wrote in The Palaeontological Association newsletter in 2017. “Wetting the surface allows fossil and mineral textures to stand out sharply, rather than being lost in the blur of intersecting micro-reflections and micro-refractions that come out of a dry surface.