BOSTON — The sex lives of constipated scorpions, cute ducklings with an innate sense of physics, and a life-size rubber moose may not appear to have much in common, but they all inspired the winners of this year's Ig Nobels, the prize for comical scientific achievement.
Even though the ceremony was prerecorded, it retained much of the fun of the live event usually held at Harvard University. "It all has to do with the flow that occurs behind that leading organism and the way that moving in formation can actually be an energetic benefit," said the appropriately named Fish, whose specialty is studying how animals swim.
So she set people up on blind dates in real social settings, measured their physiological reactions and found that the heart rates of people attracted to each other synchronized."It really depends, on how you define love," Prochazkova, a researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said in an email."What we found in our research was that people were able to decide whether they want to date their partner very quickly.
Frequent moose vs. vehicle collisions on Sweden's highways often result in injuries and death to both human and animal, Gers said in an email. Yet automobile makers rarely include animal crashes in their safety testing.