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Smart Toilet, Reanimated Robot Spiders Among Winners Of Ig Nobel Prizes
- By The Financial District
- Sep 22, 2023
- 2 min read
The winners of the tongue-in-cheek Ig Nobel prizes for this year include the developers of robot zombie spiders, a smart toilet, research into rock licking, and an analysis of nose hair numbers, as reported by Ben Hooper for the United Press International (UPI).
Seung-min Park of Stanford University was awarded the Public Health Prize for the development of a "smart toilet" that analyzes human waste to identify health issues and recognizes a user by identifying their unique "anal print." I Photo: Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam
The 33rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research and presented by real Nobel Prize laureates, were given out in an online ceremony that featured the theme of water and included the performance of a "mini-non-opera" on the subject.
The awards are given out for "achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think."
The Literature Prize was awarded to an international team "for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times."
The study looked into how repetition leads to a feeling of jamais vu, in which something familiar begins to feel unfamiliar.
The winner of this year's Chemistry and Geology Prize was University of Leicester researcher Jan Zalasiewicz for his research into "why many scientists like to lick rocks." Zalasiewicz said there are accounts of 18th-century geologists using their sense of taste to identify rocks and other minerals.
The Mechanical Engineering Prize went to a team from Houston's Rice University who pioneered the field of "necrobotics" by reanimating the corpses of dead wolf spiders to use as mechanical grabbing tools.
Seung-min Park of Stanford University was awarded the Public Health Prize for the development of a "smart toilet" that analyzes human waste to identify health issues and recognizes a user by identifying their unique "anal print."
