Venomous SNAKE found HIDING in football player’s helmet
An Arkansas high school football player got an alarming surprise after practice when a cottonmouth snake was found tucked inside his helmet. Animal control officers later removed the roughly two-foot reptile from the helmet’s padding after the teen had already worn the gear on the field.
A wonderfully odd lineup of researchers earned recognition this week for science that sounds strange at first glance but is very real, including work on cockroach milk, the origins of kissing and an underwear-based method for measuring soil health.
The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, a satirical celebration of unusual scientific research with genuine academic roots, was held Thursday in Zurich and organized by the digital publication Annals of Improbable Research.
Launched in 1991, the offbeat awards were staged outside the United States for the first time this year, amid concerns that some winners might face visa difficulties traveling to the U.S.
Among the other honorees were scientists who examined why wealthier people may be more prone to unethical acts, including taking candy from a baby, along with studies exploring the correct way to blow your nose and what happens when researchers carefully step on snakes to learn what triggers them to bite.
Soil Science Prize winners Pia Viviani, right, and Atlant Bieri, left, stand on stage during the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at the Zurich Convention Center in Zurich, Switzerland, Thursday. (Claudio Thoma/Keystone via AP)
“The general pattern seems to be that, with wealth and rising power, you become less engaged with the needs of others and less burdened by the needs of social relationships,” Dr. Paul Piff, a social psychologist at the University of California, Irvine said, according to the Guardian.
“Taking candy from children might be the least of our worries, but it’s emblematic of the tendency to prioritize one’s own needs over those of others.”
The final four honorees included those studying the power of having mutual enemies, attempts at a splash-free urinal, using dead mosquitos for 3D printing and research that found parents love the smell of their newborn babies but not teenage children.
In case you’re wondering, the team studying the history of kissing has defined it as “a non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer.” Romantic.
From left, Nobel Prize winners Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, Michel Mayor and Tim Hunt look at underwear handed over by the Soil Science Award winners during the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at the Zurich Convention Center in Zurich, Switzerland, Thursday. (Claudio Thoma/Keystone via AP)
“Next time you kiss someone, you can think, ‘This is a 21.5 million-year-old tradition that I’m honoring here,” evolutionary biologist Matilda Brindle of the University of Oxford said, according to NPR. “It’s not just a modern human behavior. It’s really ancestral.’ And to us, that suggests that it probably has quite a useful evolutionary function.”
Brindle said her team believes that Neanderthals not only kissed each other. They may have also kissed early humans.
The winners of the Ig Nobel Prize pose for a group picture during the ceremony at the Zurich Convention Center in Zurich, Switzerland, Thursday. (Claudio Thoma/Keystone via AP)
All the honorees receive a trophy that looks like a cross between a mushroom and a human foot while the audience throws paper airplanes at them.
The Ig Nobel has no relation to the actual Nobel Prize, which will announce its honorees in October.