62 | NewScientist | 21 September 2013

FEEDBACK

FEEDBACK’S favourite awards, the Ig Nobel prizes, were handed out on 12 September at Harvard University by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research. The prizes honour research that makes you laugh, then think.

A JOINT Ig Nobel prize in biology and astronomy went to Marcus Byrne at the University of the Witwatersrand and Clarke Scholtz of the University of Pretoria, both in South Africa, alongside Marie Dacke, Emily Baird and Eric Warrant of Lund University in Sweden, for their discovery that dung beetles use the Milky Way to orient themselves at night (New Scientist, 2 February, p 15).

As a person with no sense of direction, Dacke says she was “fascinated how well [the beetles] could find their way back to a tiny nest entrance or follow a set bearing”. To see how the beetles managed such feats on dark, moonless nights, the researchers moved their experiments into a planetarium. They found the beetles were aligning their motion

Belarusian Konstantin Kaplin was convicted of “applauding in public” despite the fact that he has only one arm

with the Milky Way, which they see as the brightest thing in the sky when there is no moon.

THE physics prize went to Alberto Minetti at the University of Milan, Italy, and his colleagues Yuri Ivanenko, Germana Cappellini, Nadia Dominici and Francesco Lacquaniti for demonstrating that people could run on water in lunar gravity. “Lizards and small birds are capable of running on the water surface on Earth for very short distances, and I was wondering whether there could be a gravity value at which humans could also do that,” says Minetti.

His group scaled up a mathematical model of a lizard running on water to human dimensions. The model showed that a person running on water on Earth would need superhuman strength and feet a square metre each in size. In lunar gravity, however, which is about one-sixth as strong as Earth’s, a mere mortal wearing diving fins on their feet might pull off the divine trick.

To test this, the group set up a hoist over a pool that bore most of the weight of a fin-equipped

runner. Four of six volunteers were able to run for 10 seconds at simulated lunar gravity.

MUSIC can soothe the soul, but what is the right kind of music for soothing a transplanted heart? Answering that question for a select population – namely, mice – earned the Ig Nobel prize in medicine for Tokyo medical researchers Masateru Uchiyama, Xiangyuan Jin, Qi Zhang, Toshihito Hirai, Atsushi Amano, Hisashi Bashuda and Masanori Niimi.

Curious to see if music could reduce the immune response that leads to transplant rejection, they transplanted hearts from one strain of mice to another, which normally causes lethal rejection (New Scientist, 31 March 2012, p 16).

In the Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery (vol 7, p 26), they report that mice with mismatched hearts who listened to the Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden playing Verdi’s La Traviata for seven days lived two to three times longer than those that listened to pure tones or “new age” music by Enya. The effects of heavy metal, techno and hip hop have yet to be determined.

THE “beer goggles” effect is well known for making drinkers think that other people are more attractive than they might otherwise appear. The Ig Nobel prize in psychology honoured researchers who showed the effect extends to making people who are drunk – or even those who merely think they are drunk – consider themselves more attractive.

Brad Bushman of Ohio State University in Columbus and colleagues Laurent Bègue, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra and Medhi Ourabah, all in France, gave half of a group of French students drinks containing enough alcohol to make them tipsy, and gave the rest non-alcoholic drinks. They told half

of each group the truth about what they had consumed and lied to the other half. Then they filmed each participant delivering a speech and afterwards asked them to rate how attractive they looked in the footage.

The students who had drunk alcohol – or who had been told they had drunk alcohol but actually had not – both rated themselves as more attractive than did the group of people who were stone-cold sober and knew it. The researchers reported their findings in a paper

titled “ ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’: People who think they are drunk also think they are attractive” (British Journal of Psychology, vol 104, p 225).

FINALLY, the Ig Nobel peace prize went to Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, and to the Belarus state police, who arrested a one-armed man for applauding.

Lukashenko’s 2011 law was aimed not at those clapping his opponents, but to protesters who clapped ironically during his own speeches. When hundreds of these were rounded up by police and appeared in court, they included a bystander, Konstantin Kaplin, who was convicted of “applauding in public” despite the fact that he has only one arm.

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