The Schnobel Prize has been awarded for explaining scientists’ predilection for licking rocks
The Schnobel Prize in Chemistry and Geology has been awarded for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks, according to the prize’s website.
The 33rd Schnobel Prize ceremony (also known as the anti-Nobel Prize) was held online, organisers said.
The literature prize was awarded for studying the sensations people experience when they repeat the word “many” many times.
Experiments to revive dead spiders for use as mechanical grasping tools won the mechanical engineering award.
The Public Health Prize was awarded for the invention of the Stanford toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies, including a test strip to analyse urine, a computer vision system to analyse faeces and a telecommunications link to monitor and rapidly analyse substances excreted by humans.
Among other things, the study of the mental performance of people who can talk backwards earned the authors the Communication Award.
The medicine prize was awarded for using cadavers to investigate whether there is an equal amount of hair in each of a person’s two nostrils.
Meanwhile, experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the flavour of food earned the authors of said study a nutrition award.
An education award was given for a “methodical” study of teacher and student boredom.
An award in psychology was given for experiments on a city street to find out how many passers-by stop to look up when they see other passers-by looking up.
The out-of-the-box measurement of the extent to which “anchovy sexual activity affects ocean water mixing” won the study’s authors a physics prize.
The Schnobel Prize is awarded for scientific research that “first makes you laugh and then makes you think.” Although many of the studies for which the prize is awarded seem seem at first glance pointless or absurd, many of them, as the organisers hint, still have scientific value.