Ig Nobel Prize 2023: From re-animated dead spider to smart toilets, here's the list of winners

The Nobel Prize is the most prestigious award given for intellectual achievement. However, the Ig Nobel Prize, first awarded in 1991, celebrates the most trivial and ridiculous things the best and brightest minds have studied.

It aims to "honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The name of the award is a pun on the Nobel Prize, which it parodies, and on the word ignoble.

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The 33rd Ig Nobel Prize ceremony happened online on Thursday. The 2023 award winners are world-class experts with advanced knowledge of subjects related to humankind. They can answer questions like "How bored do students and teachers get in school?" or "How much do horny anchovies influence ocean water mixing?"

Below are the Ig Nobel Prize 2023 winners, presented with made-up "ten trillion dollar bills":

• Jan Zalasiewicz won the Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Geology for explaining why many scientists like to lick rock in her paperEating Fossils.
  
• Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Bahrain, and Akira O'Connor received the Ig Nobel Prize in Literature for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times. They published the study in their paperThe The The The Induction of Jamais Vu in the Laboratory: Word Alienation and Semantic Satiation.
  
• Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston got the Ig Nobel Prize in Mechanical Engineering for re-animating dead spiders and using them as mechanical gripping tools.
  
• Seung-min Park received the Ig Nobel Prize for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses multiple technologies, including a urinalysis dipstick test strip and a computer vision system which analyses defecations. It also has an anal-print sensor with an identification camera and a telecommunications link to monitor and quickly analyse excreted substances.
  
• María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García received the Ig Nobel Prize in Communication for studying mental activities of people who are experts at speaking backwards.
  
• Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for using corpses to study whether there is an equal number of hair in the two nostrils of each person.
  
• Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura won the Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition for conducting experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws change food's taste.
  
• Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan received the Ig Nobel Prize in Education for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.
  
• Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology for their experiments on a city street. The study measured the number of people who stopped to look upward when they saw strangers looking upward.
  
• Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido received an Ig Nobel Prize in Physics for estimating the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.

(With inputs from agencies)

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