Held at Harvard University in the United States every year, the Ig Nobel Awards are intended to “honour achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think.”
A research group that includes three Polish scientists got an Ig Nobel on Thursday for their discovery that magnetised live cockroaches behave differently than dead ones.
The study proved that living cockroaches are capable of detecting magnetic fields, and can thus demagnetise in a couple of minutes, whereas the same process for dead insects takes hours.
This can find applications in magnetic sensors, according to Gazeta Wyborcza.
Among this year’s other winners are researchers who tried to explain why wombats produce cube-shaped excrement, as well as scientists who checked banknotes of various currencies for their disease transmission abilities.
Now in their 29th year, the Ig Nobels are organised by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine.
(jh/gs)
Source: Gazeta Wyborcza, nature.com