| inbluevt | Date: Saturday, 2013/09/14, 0:39 AM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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Mice given heart transplants survived 20 days longer if they listened to La Traviata. Photograph: Tristram Kenton.
Wagner would have killed them....
Stargazing dung beetles, mice that survive for longer after heart surgery when they listen to opera, and whether or not you could walk on water on other planets – all of them are serious scientific questions that researchers sweated over for years. On Thursday, their hard work was honoured with possibly one of the most sought-after nods from their scientific peers: an Ig Nobel prize.
This is the 23rd year of the awards – a spoof of the even more prestigious Nobel prizes, which will be announced next month. The 10 prizes, organised by the humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research and awarded at Harvard University, honour achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think".
The joint astronomy and biology prize went to Eric Warrant's team at the University of Lund for their discovery that dung beetles navigate using the stars.
The researchers had been studying the beetles' ability to roll their balls of dung in straight lines by using the moon as a guide – they use the pattern of polarised light around the moon as a kind of celestial compass.
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Message edited by inbluevt - Saturday, 2013/09/14, 0:41 AM |
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