The weird wide world of science

Licking rocks is a pretty good way to test whether the object is actually a rock, or just a piece of fossilized bone, according to this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes.

🤔 Um, what ?... The Ig Nobel prizes are an annual spectacle, created as an ode to strange scientific discoveries, with real Nobel laureates in attendance to announce spoof prizes.

Some of the honorees:

• Psychology: Social psychologist Stanley Milgram – known for his 1960s shock experiment studies on obedience to authority – and two colleagues studied how many pedestrians stopped to look upward when they saw strangers do so. (Results: The bigger the crowd, the more people who looked up.)
• Mechanical Engineering: Five Rice University graduate students used the corpses of dead spiders as robotic claws for picking up and maneuvering tiny electronic parts, in a novel research area they dubbed “necrobotics.”
• Public Health: Urology professor Dr. Seung-min Park invented the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a wide range of technologies – including a urinalysis test strip, a computer vision system, and an anal-print sensor – to monitor and quickly analyze human excretions.

See the full list of winners.