The 34th Schnobel Prize ceremony was held at Harvard. A parody of the Nobel Prize, this award is given for “research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think.”
The Peace Prize was awarded to the late American psychologist BF Skinner. He proposed placing pigeons inside rockets and using them as targets. In the 1940s, a scientist developed a special harness for birds and trained them to “look” at targets on a screen. Despite the successes achieved in training pigeons, the United States decided to close the project.
The demography prize was awarded to Dr Sol Newman of Oxford University. He did some “detective work” and determined that most people’s long lives were the result of bureaucratic errors: the regions where they lived historically had more errors in issuing birth and death certificates.
French doctors decided to find out whether the direction of hair curls on the skull depends on the hemisphere of the Earth in which people live. The results showed that the hair of people living in the southern hemisphere is more twisted clockwise, and in the northern hemisphere it is more twisted clockwise. For this discovery they received the prize for anatomy.
The physics prize was awarded to scientists who proved that a dead trout can swim, but also swim against the current. The study was conducted at Harvard University for more than a decade. The results showed that this can happen, for example, when there is a cylindrical obstacle along the river flow and a vortex path forms behind it.
A team from Amsterdam won the chemistry prize for developing a method to separate “drunk” worms from “sober” ones.
In the field of medicine, the prize was awarded to scientists who discovered that placebo drugs with side effects of working drugs were more effective than placebos without the same side effects.
In the field of botany, the prize went to Jacob White from the United States and Felipe Yamashita from Germany. They demonstrated that some plants can imitate the shape of the leaves of nearby artificial plants.
The prize was awarded to scientists from several European countries in the field of probability theory. They proved theoretically and practically that a tossed coin falls more on the side it is on. To do this, 48 people tossed the coin about 351 thousand times. The researchers plan to continue the experiments.
The Physiology Prize was awarded to Japanese scientists who discovered that pigs and rodents can breathe through their rear holes. The study was published in 2021. Scientists hoped that this discovery would help those suffering from respiratory failure: during the pandemic, ventilators were not available to everyone.
