The 32nd annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony has been held recently. The prize was established in 1991 as an antipode of the Nobel Prize. Its aim is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think". The prize is awarded for unusual and witty research to attract public attention and spur the interest in science, medicine and technology. This year all the winners received paper cylinders symbolizing "a container for storing all their knowledge", as well as 10 trillion Zimbabwe dollars, money that is no longer used.
The award in the category "Safety Technology" was given to the engineer Magnus Gens from Sweden who invented a stuffed moose for car crash tests. The Japanese professor Gen Matsuzaki won the nomination "Technical Skills" for founding out how to use our fingers more efficiently to turn the door knob. The winner certificate in the nomination "Applied Cardiology" was given to a group of scientists for figuring out that the heart beats of lovers get synchronized. A research team from Canada, the USA, the UK and Australia had analyzed what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand, for which they received an award in the "Literature" nomination. The "Biology" category winners were the scientists who studied the anatomical features of Brazilian and Colombian scorpions.Also, several groups of scientists received the Ig Nobel Prize for studying how ducklings follow each other and their mother duck, for trying to ease chemotherapy pain and side effects with ice cream, and for finding reasons for the success of not talented people but lucky ones. The scientists from China, Hungary, Canada, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Italy, Australia, Switzerland, and the USA have developed an algorithm that "helps gossip mongers decide when to tell the truth and when to lie."The group of Russian state universities RACUS solemnly vows to enjoy all the discoveries of the Ig Nobel Prize winners. In 2022, we also worked on a number of entertaining projects: we analyzed how to get from point A to point B in the most peculiar way, fantasized about how to create a non-melting dessert for Saudi Arabia and devoted many months to studying the influence of the student's favorite color on their academic performance. We did not receive the Ig Nobel prize, so all our hopes are for our dear students who give us joy and funny stories every day... If we managed to solve their puzzles, the prize would definitely be ours! We promise to try to climb this Olympus again next year – dear students, please, keep bringing us joy!
