Anyone who, as a layman, has ever had to go to a notary or read a contract will have asked themselves: why are such texts so difficult to understand? Eric Martínez, Edward Gibson, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Francis Mollica from the University of Edinburgh have analyzed this using ten million words of corresponding works and published it in the journal »Cognition«. The result: “Compared to nine other basic genres of written and spoken English, contracts contain a surprisingly high proportion of certain hard-to-process features, such as rare technical terms, clauses embedded in the middle (resulting in syntactic dependencies over long lengths), Passive structures and non-standard capitalization.« It remains unclear whether the layperson understands this better, but for the Ig Nobel Prize jury this publication is clearly worthy of an award in the »Literature« category.
The prize has now been awarded for the 32nd time, and as always, the members of the committee honored publications that often received little attention with a wink: »Every winner (or every winning team) has done something that first made people laugh and then laughed Makes you think,« writes the jury on its website.
The »Prize for Applied Cardiology«, for example, goes to Eliska Prochazkova from the University of Leiden and her team for a work that could have great meaning for lovers. As they write in Nature Human Behaviour, when people first meet, their heartbeats seem to synchronize rapidly and then find each other instantly attracted.
Frank Fish of West Chester University and Zhiming Yuan of the University of Strathclyde, on the other hand, are fascinated by ducklings. The fluffy offspring of the waterfowl usually follow the mother in a relatively orderly row and not in wild chaos. And the reason for this is physics: the mother swimming in front causes a bow wave and vortices behind her stern, which the chicks behind take advantage of. “By riding on the waves created by the mother duckling, the following duckling can achieve a significant reduction in wave resistance. When a duckling swims right behind its mother, a destructive wave interference phenomenon occurs, and the duckling’s wave resistance becomes positive, propelling the duckling forward. What’s even more interesting is that in a single-line formation, the rest of the ducklings can maintain this wave-riding advantage,” write Yuan and co.