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A motley crew of scientists was honored this week for its unusual contributions, which included studying cockroach milk, the evolutionary history of kissing and testing soil health by using underwear.
The satirical Ig Nobel ceremony, which honors unusual but real studies, took place in Zurich Thursday and was presented by the digital magazine, the Annals of Improbable Research.
The awards, which were founded in 1991, took place outside the U.S. for the first time this year over the concern that the honorees wouldn’t be able to get a visa.
Other winners included researchers who found upper-class people were more likely to engage in unethical behavior, such as stealing candy from a baby, a study on proper nose blowing and gently stepping on snakes to see what provokes them into biting people.
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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)
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“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.
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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.
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The Ig Nobel has no relation to the actual Nobel Prize, which will announce its honorees in October.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
