Venomous SNAKE found HIDING in football player’s helmet
An Arkansas high school football player made a startling discovery after practice when he found a cottonmouth snake tucked inside his helmet. Animal control officers later removed the two-foot reptile from the helmet’s padding after the athlete had already worn the gear during the workout.
A wide-ranging group of scientists was recognized this week for research that was as unusual as it was real, from examining cockroach milk and tracing the evolutionary history of kissing to measuring soil health with the help of buried underwear.
The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, a satirical event celebrating quirky scientific studies, was held Thursday in Zurich and presented by the digital magazine the Annals of Improbable Research.
Founded in 1991, the awards were staged outside the United States for the first time this year amid concerns that some honorees might not be able to obtain visas.
Other Ig Nobel winners included researchers who found that upper-class people were more likely to behave unethically, including taking candy from a baby, as well as scientists behind studies on the proper way to blow one’s nose and on gently stepping on snakes to determine what triggers them to bite.
Soil Science Prize winners Pia Viviani, right, and Atlant Bieri, left, appear 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.
