Netherlands nabs two Ig Nobel prizes
Dutch researchers have won two Ig Nobel prizes this year, fun science awards which ‘honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think’.
Researchers Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan and Tulio M. Guadalupe of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam won the psychology prize for their study on why leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower seem smaller.
US-based Dutch biologist Frans de Wal and American partner Jennifer Pokorny won the anatomy prize for research showing that chimpanzees can recognize their fellow chimps from photographs of their butts.
The Dutch have won many times before. We posted about rats that cannot tell between Japanese and Dutch in 2007 and research on reducing astma symptoms by taking people for a roller coaster ride in 2010.
(Link: www.dutchnews.nl)
Let’s not forget Bart Knols and Ruurd de Jong of Wageningen University who won the 2006 Biology Ig Nobel Prize “for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet” (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners#2006).
This is actually very useful to help fighting malaria with, for instance, mosquito traps simply made of limburger cheese (it’s apparently easier to make than a trap made of human feet).