The phenomenon of fluff accumulation in the navel and what is the territory of an Indian elephant
Dr. Karl Kruzelnicki, a physicist from the University of Sydney in Australia, has devoted a significant part of his career to a question that particularly bothered him: why round lumps of dirt accumulate in the navels of many men and women. To find an answer to the question, he conducted a comprehensive study that examined the bodies of which people accumulate navel fluff; when the phenomenon occurs; what color is the fluff; And in what quantities it usually accumulates.
For the purpose of the study, Kruzelnicki recruited other colleagues from the University of Sydney, and together they collected 4,799 samples of fluff from people who mailed it to them. At the end of the experiment, Dr. Kruzlicki came to some insights: lint tends to accumulate mainly in men's navels; Lint is made from a combination of clothing fibers and skin cells; The fluff reaches the navel through the hairs on the abdomen.
"The typical producer of navel fluff is a middle-aged man, slightly overweight and with a hairy belly. The color of the fluff is bluish in the road, and the reason for this is that most people wear blue or gray pants that skim the body," claimed Kruzelnicki.
In recognition of his work, Dr. Kruzelnicki was awarded the "Ig Nobel" prize for interdisciplinary research last Friday. The prize is awarded every year - a week before the awarding of the real Nobel Prize in Stockholm - to people whose research achievements "do not or do not need to be reproduced". The award is given by the journal "Chronicles of Improbable Science" (http://improbable.com), in a ceremony held at Harvard University in the USA. At the last ceremony, about a thousand spectators were present, among them some real Nobel Prize winners in the fields of chemistry and physics.
According to the magazine, the purpose of the award is not to insult people, but to "celebrate the unusual and honor the fertile imagination". Indeed, Kruzelnicky accepted the win in good spirits. "This is a great honor", he said, "it introduces people to the idea that science is fun".
This year's Ig-Nobel prize for medicine was awarded to a study published in the journal Nature, one of the most prestigious journals in medicine. The study was conducted by Dr. Chris McManus from "University College" in London and was published under the title "Asymmetry in the scrotum of men in ancient sculptures". While on vacation in Italy, McManus recalled an 18th-century historian who claimed that in sculptures "the left testicle is always larger, as in nature." McManus decided to scrutinize the claim. He carefully examined 107 statues, and discovered that the historian was right about the statues but wrong about the men. In many statues it was indeed discovered that the left testicle is larger than the right, but among men it was found that the right testicle is the larger one.
The Ig-Nobel Prize in Biology was awarded this year to Dr. Norma Bouvier, Dr. Phil Bowers and Dr. Charles Paxton from Great Britain for their research "Courtship behavior in ostriches directed towards humans on agricultural farms in Great Britain". The researchers wanted to find out why some ostriches on agricultural farms in the UK started courting human farm workers and not their own kind. Their research was published in the journal "British Poultry."Science
Dr. Kanut Sreekumar from the "Kerala Agricultural University" in India, won the Ig-Nobel Prize in Mathematics for a study that tried to estimate the total surface area of Indian elephants. Sreekumar was able to formulate equations that estimated the surface area of the elephant using calculations based on the measurements of individual parts of the elephant's body.
