A study which determined that most mammals take about the same amount of time to pee and the development of a chemical formula to partially unboil an egg were two of the 10 big winners of the 2015 Ig Noble awards, a parody of the world’s top scientific honors.
Patricia Yang, a PhD student in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, and her colleagues won the physics prize for modeling the fluid dynamics involved in the urination process and revealing that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds).
They tested a variety of different creatures, included rats, goats, cows and elephants, and found that all mammals weighing more than 3kg empty their bladders in roughly the same amount of time – although they did discover that smaller animals break this rule. For instance, Yang’s team found that rats can urinate completely in less than a second, according to BBC News.
Colin Raston from Flinders University and his colleagues earned the top prize in chemistry for creating the vortex fluidic device, which unravels proteins or “unboils” an egg, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The device has already been used to improve the delivery of carboplatin, a drug commonly used to treat ovarian and lung cancers.
Benefits of kissing, chickens that walk like dinosaurs also awarded
Other studies that were recognized that the awards ceremony, which is held each year at Harvard University, include a study that found the word “huh?” or its equivalent in every human language (literature prize), one that found many business leaders started liking to take risks after emerging unscathed from natural disasters (management prize) and two teams that were jointly honored for looking at the health benefits or consequences of intense kissing (medicine prize).
New reports revealing that the Bangkok Metropolitan Police department paid officers extra cash for refusing to take bribes (economics prize), a study which tried to use mathematical methods to determine if and how a former Moroccan emperor managed to father 888 children (mathematics prize) and research which found that attaching a weighted stick to a chicken’s hindquarters made it walk in a manner similar to that associated with dinosaurs (biology prize) were also honored.
Rounding out the honorees were studies determining that acute appendicitis can be accurately diagnosed by the amount of pain experienced by a patient when driven over speed bumps (diagnostic medicine prize), and two probing which type of insect stings cause the most pain and which parts of the body hurt the worst after being stung – the latter of which involved a scientist willingly getting stung by bees for the cause of science (physiology and entomology prize).
The Ig Nobel awards, which are run by the folks behind the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, are not meant to be mean spirited, according to the organizers. Instead, they are designed to “celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.”
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