It was the amazing pieces of science that researchers celebrated at this year’s Ig Nobel award ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. Real Nobel Laureates have awarded ten prizes.
Marc Abrahams, founder and organizer of the Ig Nobel event and editor of the Annals of Improbable Research: “This is the first person, and everyone in the same room, party that we have done since before the pandemic this.
On Thursday night, Abrahams stood before a packed audience in one of MIT’s large lecture halls. He said: “We honor exceptional people and groups. Every Ig Nobel laureate has done something that first makes people laugh, then makes them think.
Plants that see
“I feel that my research fits very well with this prize because I get a lot of comments about the paper,” says Felipe Yamashita with a laugh, a botanist and one of the prize winners.
He has a different view of plants. “I believe in that plant[s] you can see,” he confirms. “I don’t know how they see. They don’t have an eye, but I’m sure they can understand what’s going on [on].”
Yamashita recently completed his Ph.D. in botany at the University of Bonn. His thesis focused on a type of plant called Trifoliolate lip found in the temperate rain forests of southern Chile and Argentina. Ten years ago, a paper appeared that said just that B. trifoliolata it can change the shape of the leaf of a lobe or be twisted to make the shape of the leaves of other plants.
Those authors thought it was due to chemicals or microbes, but Yamashita and his colleague had their doubts. He says: “We really did not agree with that. And we said, ‘Okay, let’s do another test [that] witness[s] that maybe [the plants] have a vision.’ ”
Yamashita’s experiment was simple. He planted several plants on a trellis divided by two shelves. These invisible barriers blocked the lower part of the plant from the upper part. On top of the trellis, Yamashita weaved a plastic plant with thin leaves that didn’t budge. The artificial plants did not contain any chemicals or biological agents that could trigger the reaction of the simulated organism.
When the actual plant grew, the leaves under the shelves were bent. But “almost all the leaves that grew near the plastic sheet had copied the shape of the plastic sheet,” says Yamashita. That is, the imitation leaves were long and very thin.
Yamashita thinks that the real leaves felt the shape of the plastic leaves by seeing where they emitted light and where it did not. He says: “So the leaf grows one way, not the other way.” “One way, not the other way.”
It’s a form of seeing, concludes Yamashita. He says it can act as camouflage to help the plant blend in with its neighbors to reduce predation by other herbivores. The results were published in the journal Plant Symbol & Behavior.
The myth of aging
Another Ig Nobel recipient is Saul Justin Newman, a distinguished academic at Oxford University.
He says: “My family made fun of me. “Every scientist dreams of a Nobel, but my dream had a typo and I’m very happy.”
Newman won his award for his research showing that the data relating to some of the world’s longest-lived people is riddled with errors.
For example, the world’s tallest man has three birthdays, one of which appears to be a deliberate fraud.” he says. “In Japan, 82% of 100-year-olds lived on paper – and died.”
The list goes on. “I had a lady who got up to 103 in the freezer,” says Newman.
He admits at first, these results sound ridiculous. But something bad is happening.
“Imagine your father dies or your mother dies at age 95,” he explains. “You don’t have a job, and their pension check comes a week after they die.” . All you have to do to keep that pension check rolling forever is not to register your death. ”
Newman says it’s easy to get away. And he found a correlation between people who reach amazing ages on paper and places in the world where there is a lot of pension fraud.
“It doesn’t make sense because all these places don’t rank high on any liveability metric,” he says.
Other Ig Nobel winners this year include a prize for studying the swimming ability of dead fish. Another showed how to separate drunk worms from sober ones.
Abrahams closed the awards ceremony with these words:
“If you didn’t win the Ig Nobel Prize tonight – especially if you did – good luck next year.”
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