Here are the winners of the 2022 Ig Nobel Prizes

Would you give yourself an alcohol enema for science? Test the running speed of constipated scorpions in the lab? Build your very own moose crash test dummy? Or maybe you'd like to tackle the thorny question of why legal documents are so relentlessly incomprehensible. These and other unusual research endeavors were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2022 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it's that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science. You can watch the livestream of the awards ceremony here.

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor "achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think." The unapologetically campy award ceremony usually features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words. Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of scientific merit.

Viewers can tune in for the usual 24/7 lectures, as well as the premiere of a mini-opera, The Know-It-All Club, in which every member "makes clear their opinion that there is only one person in the Know-It-All Club who knows anything"—in keeping with the evening's theme of knowledge. The winners will also give free public talks in the weeks following the ceremony, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.

Here are the winners of the 2022 Ig Nobel Prizes.

Art History Prize

Citation: "Peter de Smet and Nicholas Hellmuth, for their study 'A Multidisciplinary Approach to Ritual Enema Scenes on Ancient Maya Pottery.'"

Honestly, I could write an entire article about this fascinating 1986 paper, adapted from the doctoral dissertation of de Smet. The study focuses on the polychrome pottery of the late classic Mayan period (600–900 CE), which frequently depicts palace scenes, ball games, hunting parties, and dances associated with human sacrifice (via decapitation). But in 1977, scholars discovered one Maya jar depicting the administration of an enema—and subsequently several others as well.

Painted polychrome Maya bowl showing a ritual enema. There is a smoking monkey at left and a water lily jaguar (with a small jug at the tip of its tail) in the middle.

Nicholas Hellmuth

Painted polychrome Maya bowl showing a ritual enema. There is a smoking monkey at left and a water lily jaguar (with a small jug at the tip of its tail) in the middle. Nicholas Hellmuth

Another view of the painted polychrome Maya bowl showing a ritual enema. Another smoking money appears to be holding an enema syringe while a human figure holds one hand near their anus.

Nicholas Hellmuth

Another view of the painted polychrome Maya bowl showing a ritual enema. Another smoking money appears to be holding an enema syringe while a human figure holds one hand near their anus. Nicholas Hellmuth

Painted polychrome Maya bowl showing a ritual enema. There is a smoking monkey at left and a water lily jaguar (with a small jug at the tip of its tail) in the middle. Nicholas Hellmuth

Another view of the painted polychrome Maya bowl showing a ritual enema. Another smoking money appears to be holding an enema syringe while a human figure holds one hand near their anus. Nicholas Hellmuth

Apparently, the Maya were known to administer medicinal enemas, but the pottery scenes suggested that they may also have taken intoxicating enemas in a ritualistic setting. De Smet and Hellmuth analyzed the iconography on several pottery pieces depicting enemas, as well as the linguistic glyphs appearing in those scenes. They also compiled a list of the possible "ethnopharmacological" substances the Maya might have ingested.

In the time-honored tradition of scientific self-experimentation, de Smet (a self-described "non-inhaling smoker" and "regular user of coffee and beer") tested the efficacy of a couple of the suspected substances by administering enemas on himself. He drank an oral alcoholic concoction for comparison before separately administering a clyster. Both concoctions had about 5 percent alcoholic content "since a clyster with an alcoholic content of 20 percent is quite irritating to the rectal tissue," so a lot of the concoction needed to be consumed. Intoxication levels were measured with a breathalyzer. "The results certainly support the theoretical suggestion that alcohol is absorbed well from an enema," the authors concluded.

De Smet wisely declined to self-administer a tobacco enema, given the evidence for toxic side effects. Nor did he personally test psilocybin mushrooms, fly agaric, water lily (a possible hallucinogenic), Tsitse (Erythina alkaloids), or Toh-ku—all less likely candidates for use in the rituals depicted on the pottery. He also chose to skip toad poison (the Bufo alkaloid bufotenin). Instead, he administered an enema of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is closely related, finding "no discernible effect." That's an N of 1, however, with a rather low dose. The authors recommended "further research" to expand the sample size and dose range, but we did not delve deeper to discover whether any other intrepid researchers followed de Smet down the self-administered enema path.

Applied Cardiology Prize

Citation: "Eliska Prochazkova, Elio Sjak-Shie, Friederike Behrens, Daniel Lindh, and Mariska Kret, for seeking and finding evidence that when new romantic partners meet for the first time and feel attracted to each other, their heart rates synchronize."

Dating—especially blind dating—can be a special kind of hell until something "clicks" between two people and they feel a gut connection and mutual attraction. The emergence of online dating services should in principle make the process much easier, but in reality, while people might make a list of their most desired qualities in a partner, there's no substitute for that gut connection. Without it, even someone who technically ticks all the boxes inevitably falls short of the ideal.

But what are the elements that give rise to that gut feeling? The authors of this Ig Nobel-winning study wanted to find out, and they decided to conduct their study outside the confines of the laboratory. They recruited 140 participants (71 pairs) at three separate events in the Netherlands: a music festival, an arts and science festival, and a science film festival. Subjects were ushered two at a time into a "dating cabin," where they sat on opposite ends of a table with a plastic divider between them. The barrier opened for three seconds to give them a quick first visual impression. Then it opened twice more over the course of the run to give subjects two minutes each of verbal and non-verbal interactions. After, subjects decided whether they wanted to go on another date with their match.

The authors had predicted that successful matches would synchronize on multiple levels of expression: motor movements, gaze, and heart rate and skin conductance measures. At the end of the blind "date," 34 percent of the women and 53 percent of the men expressed a desire for a second date with their partner, but the feeling was mutual in just 17 percent of the random pairings. Smiles, laughter, eye gaze, or mimicry of signals weren't significantly associated with attraction, but rises and falls in the synchrony of couples' heart rate and skin conductance did correlate with rising and falling levels of attraction. The upshot: The heart wants what the heart wants—and the skin conductance concurs.

Master of Ceremonies Marc Abraham hosting the virtual 2021 Ig Nobel Prizes.

Credit: YouTube/Improbable Research

Literature Prize

Citation: "Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica, and Edward Gibson, for analyzing what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand."

Legal contracts of all sorts are known for their impenetrable jargon and tortured sentence structure, which might be one reason most of us rarely read the many online terms of service agreements we encounter as we navigate our online lives. Granted, there are legal theorists who insist that legal texts are difficult for the average person to understand because the law is a system of expert knowledge and by its nature deals with many technical concepts. That is, the jargon is necessary for technical precision. There are others who take issue with this idea, arguing that the law is actually built upon quite ordinary concepts like cause, consent, and best interest. So the impenetrability of legal texts is due to psycholinguistic factors. (Similar arguments might be made with regard to scientific papers.)

The authors decided to put these competing hypotheses to the test, focusing on key psycholinguistic characteristics: nonstandard capitalization, such as phrases rendered in ALL CAPS; the frequency of archaic words (aforesaid, herein, to wit) that rarely appear in everyday speech; word choice (whether legal jargon can be replaced by simpler terms without out losing key nuances of meaning); the use of passive versus active voice; and center-embedding—when lawyers embed legal jargon within convoluted syntax.

First, the researchers analyzed a database of legal contracts and court documents between 2018 and 2020 and compared that analysis with a database of documents in standard English. They measured the frequency of each of the above characteristics and found a striking difference, with legal documents using them much more frequently. Next, 108 human subjects were asked to read 12 pairs of contract excerpts. The results supported the psycholinguistics hypothesis, with center-embedding presenting the greatest comprehension difficulty for readers.

Biology Prize

Citation: "Solimary García-Hernández and Glauco Machado, for studying whether and how constipation affects the mating prospects of scorpions."

Nature has evolved many different survival strategies against predators, but one of the most extreme is autotomy—voluntarily detaching a body part to escape a threat. Some insect and spider species will detach legs, for instance, while lizards and salamanders will sacrifice their tails. Certain scorpion species (Ananteris balzani) were recently discovered to also sacrifice their tails, but the peculiarities of their anatomy mean losing the entire "metasoma": the posterior parts of the nervous, circulatory, and digestive systems. This includes the stinger, venom glands, and the anus, making it impossible for the scorpion to defecate.

Yes, a scorpion will make this heroic sacrifice to survive a predator, only to die of extreme constipation a few months later. The authors of this paper wanted to determine whether the metasomal loss affects the scorpion's locomotive ability, i.e., its running speed. The loss corresponds with a decrease of nearly 25 percent in the scorpion's body mass, while the resulting constipation leads to a gradual increase in body mass. So the authors hypothesized that running speed would increase in the short term and decrease as the constipation became severe.

In the end, the authors disproved the weight loss hypothesis after a series of short- and long-term experiments involving 154 male and female scorpions. They found no effect on the running speed of either male or female scorpions after shedding the metasomal. In the short term, it means the scorpions can still actively forage and run away from predators. It also means males can still hunt for potential mates and sire offspring before succumbing to the inevitable death by constipation. The findings could shed light on why scorpions may have evolved this extreme form of autotomy.

Medicine Prize

Citation: "Marcin Jasiński, Martyna Maciejewska, Anna Brodziak, Michał Górka, Kamila Skwierawska, Wiesław Jędrzejczak, Agnieszka Tomaszewska, Grzegorz Basak, and Emilian Snarski, for showing that when patients undergo some forms of toxic chemotherapy, they suffer fewer harmful side effects when ice cream replaces one traditional component of the procedure."

Cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments are highly likely to develop a condition known as oral mucositis because the treatments break down the epithelial cells lining the gastrointestinal tract, leaving them vulnerable to infection. Patients develop sores in the mouth, gums, and/or tongue; they have increased saliva and mucus and can experience difficulty swallowing. In extreme cases, the combination of excess saliva, mucus, and pain—especially combined with the nausea and vomiting common with chemo and radiation—means it's almost impossible to eat.

Gearing up for the traditional throwing of paper airplanes.

Credit: YouTube/Improbable Research

A common preventive measure is cryotherapy, which usually involves sucking on ice chips. But patients don't always fully comply with the ice-chip cryotherapy, because it becomes uncomfortably cold. Pediatric cancer patients in particular tend to respond better when ice cream is substituted for ice chips. But there had not been any studies specifically of ice cream cryotherapy, so the authors of the award-winning study decided to close that gap in the scientific literature.

This was a retroactive study involving 74 patients (mean age: 58 years) who had undergone stem cell transplantation as part of their cancer therapy. Their cryotherapy involved three "doses" of ice cream chosen from the hospital cafeteria (either popsicles or dairy products). Patients were instructed to eat slowly to let the ice cream products thaw in the mouth. The results: Only 28.85 percent of patients who followed the ice cream cryotherapy developed oral mucositis, compared to 59 percent who did not receive cryotherapy. Conclusion: Eating ice cream is a good preventive measure against developing oral mucositis in cancer patients.

Engineering Prize

Citation: "Gen Matsuzaki, Kazuo Ohuchi, Masaru Uehara, Yoshiyuki Ueno, and Goro Imura, for trying to discover the most efficient way for people to use their fingers when turning a knob."

One might be tempted to file this 1999 Japanese study under "solutions in search of a problem." But the authors emphasized the importance of good universal knob design, particularly for "instruments with rotary control." For instance, elderly people with physical challenges might find rotary knobs and faucet handles easier to manipulate than levers. The researchers' study focused on knobs in a "columnar apparatus" (as translated from the Japanese), with the aim of determining how the number of fingers used changes in response to the diameter of the knob.

The 32 subjects were all students, 19–20 years of age, and the 45 wooden test knobs ranged in diameter from 7 mm (about a quarter of an inch) to 130 mm (5 inches). The researchers placed the knobs on a transparent acrylic plate (the better to film the experiment) and put the plate on a table (about 2-1/2 feet in height). Subjects would then turn each knob clockwise with their right hand. The thumb and forefinger were used most frequently, and extra fingers were used as the knobs became wider. Subjects switched from two to three fingers at 10–11 mm (just under half an inch); from three to four fingers at 23–26 mm (about an inch); and from four to five fingers at 45–50 mm (about 1-3/4 inches). Industrial designers take note.

Physics Prize

Citation: "Frank Fish, Zhi-Ming Yuan, Minglu Chen, Laibing Jia, Chunyan Ji, and Atilla Incecik, for trying to understand how ducklings manage to swim in formation."

Back in 1994, biologist Frank Fish was curious about how formation movement in animals, like flocking, could reduce the energy expenditure of individual animals. This is true for human cyclists, who engage in "drafting" or "slipstreaming" to achieve as much as a 38 percent reduction in wind resistance and a 35 percent reduction in power output. Numerous hypothetical models had been developed for similar effects in animals, but there was little empirical data, mostly because these formations are quite large and uncontrolled, with inconsistent individual animal positioning.

(Left) Make way for ducklings: Canada goose with goslings swimming in single-file formation, River Cherwell, Oxford. (Right) Sketches of 2D duckling on a free water surface.

Credit: Zhi-Ming Yuan et al., 2021

Mallard ducklings, however, imprint on their mother and tend to swim in a single-file formation, making them a much easier case study, especially since they can be led to the water within 12 hours of hatching. Fish imprinted 12 groups of seven one-day-old ducklings on a decoy of a female mallard duck and trained them to swim for 20 to 30 minutes every day in a recirculating water channel enclosed in a metabolic chamber. Fish found that swimming in single-file formation did indeed seem to reduce metabolic effort, especially for the youngest ducklings.

Fast forward to 2021, when researchers decided to revisit Fish's work and explain the swimming formation of ducklings from the perspective of the unique wave interference phenomena on the water's surface. They found that ducklings instinctively tended to "ride the waves" generated by the mother duck to significantly reduce drag. They could even pass that drag reduction down the line to the other ducklings via "wave passing." The study helps answer the pragmatic question of how ducklings swimming in formation manage to reduce the energy expenditure of individual ducklings.

Peace Prize

Citation: "Junhui Wu, Szabolcs Számadó, Pat Barclay, Bianca Beersma, Terence Dores Cruz, Sergio Lo Iacono, Annika Nieper, Kim Peters, Wojtek Przepiorka, Leo Tiokhin and Paul Van Lange, for developing an algorithm to help gossipers decide when to tell the truth and when to lie."

We generally think of gossip as a negative factor in social interactions, but the authors of this 2021 paper treat the practice—which they define as "sharing information about absent others [the target] with one or more receivers"—as a viable strategy for promoting and sustaining cooperation, particularly in situations where there are conflicting interests with in-group or out-group members or strangers. That information can be positive, negative, or neutral, but it should be honest. Low-level dishonest gossip can be relatively harmless. But when gossip is dishonest—i.e., the gossiper lies—at sufficiently high levels, the system breaks down and that vital social cooperation can't evolve.

The authors of this 2021 study set out to determine when people are more likely to be honest or dishonest in their gossip, drawing on models of behavior signaling theory. One party, the signaler (gossiper), must choose whether and how to communicate (or signal) that information to a receiver, and the receiver in turn must choose how to interpret the signal. In the authors' words, "signals are adaptions shaped by marginal costs and marginal benefits of different behaviors, and the ultimate function of the signaler's behavior is to maximize their fitness." So the gossiper may be willing to pay a personal cost to provide a benefit to the receiver because they gain a secondary benefit as a result of the receiver's gain. Whether either strategy is successful can depend on the behavior of the target.

The authors tested this hypothesis by analyzing four two-person games with four types of possible outcomes: mutually beneficial (stag-hunt game); beneficial for the receiver but costly for the target (snowdrift game with a cooperating target); beneficial for the target but costly for the receiver (helping game with a cooperating target); and mutually costly (punishment game with a defecting target). While the gossiper is not playing the games, they do have a stake since the games help determine their own fitness interdependence—the degree to which two people positively or negatively influence each other's success— with respect to both the receiver and the target.

It all boils down to one simple rule: "Gossipers should always be honest when there is a perfect match, and they should be dishonest when there is a perfect mismatch," the authors concluded. Partial match situations require more of a judgment call, but the authors recommend that the choice be made after weighing one's fitness interdependence with the receiver and with the target and the marginal cost/benefit to be gained by being either honest or dishonest in a given situation (or "game").

Economics Prize

Citation: "Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda, for explaining mathematically why success most often goes not to the most talented people but instead to the luckiest."

There is a strong belief in Western culture that individual success is the result of personal attributes, most notably talent, intelligence, skill, perseverance, risk-taking, and old-fashioned hard work. As a result, we tend to place very successful people on pedestals. Not only do they bask in public admiration, but they are also more likely to be given additional honors, government grants, and professional opportunities. What's often ignored is the role of luck in determining individual success, although that element has been receiving a bit more attention in recent years.

These Ig Nobel-winning authors noted in their 2018 paper that the qualities most often cited as leading to great success follow a normal Gaussian distribution around a mean. The average IQ is 100, for example, but nobody boasts an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000. "The same holds for efforts, as measured by hours worked," the authors wrote. "Someone works more hours than the average and someone less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else." However, the distribution of wealth follows a power law, with lots of poor people and a few hugely wealthy billionaires. This, the authors contend, "suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes."

That hidden ingredient, they concluded, is random luck, based on the simple agent-based model the authors developed for this study. It's not that talent, intelligence, hard work, and the like don't matter. It's just that many highly talented, intelligent, and hard-working people are frequently surpassed by far more mediocre folks, according to the usual measures of success (fame, wealth). Differences in education and income levels also matter when it comes to the likelihood of success. So the "naive meritocracy" that's so pervasive in Western culture essentially switches cause and effect. Talent and hard work alone won't be enough if you aren't lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.

Safety Engineering Prize

Citation: "Magnus Gens, for developing a moose crash test dummy."

As civilization encroaches deeper into the wild, collisions between humanity and nature are bound to happen—and they're often literal collisions between cars and large wild animals. In Scandinavia, these collisions typically involve moose (aka elk). According to Ig Nobel honoree Magnus Gens, some 13 such collisions occur daily in Sweden alone, often around the month of May, and they typically involve younger animals who weigh much less (200 kg, or 440 pounds) than a full-grown Swedish moose (600 kg, or 1,322 pounds). That's when mother moose reject their one-year-old offspring so the calf can learn to fend for itself. "The first couple of weeks, the calf acts very confused and wanders about randomly," Gens wrote in his 1994 master's thesis. If the calf wanders into a car, the outcome can be fatal.

Gens decided to build a viable moose crash test dummy that car manufacturers could use in their safety R&D, partnering with Saab in Trollhättan, which supplied two test vehicles for crash test purposes. Gens brushed up on moose anatomy with the help of "a recently killed and still warm deer" and determined how that anatomy translates into the physics of a collision. The moose's center of gravity actually passes over the hood (or "bonnet")—the area designed to absorb a lot of impact energy—so the legs hit first and are instantly broken, causing the moose's body to rotate. So the initial force of the collision is small, until the moose body slams into the windshield.