NUTRITION: Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters. [Who woulda thunk it?]
MATHEMATICS: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.
LITERATURE: Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University for his report “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.” [Gotta love that title].
PHYSICS: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces.
BIOLOGY: Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen…) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) 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.
The one for medicine seems pretty strange. Maybe because it took me so long to figure out what the word “digital” must mean in this particular situation. Strange as it is, though, it could be helpful—you just never know.
I’ve always wondered about that thing with the fingernails and blackboard (acoustics). I went to school in the days of slate blackboards and sometimes the chalk would make that horrible screeching noise on the board. I’m not sure how that happened-maybe the angle of the chalk.
Copied from a website. (neuroscience for kids newsletter)
Rubbing styrofoam together was almost as annoying as scraping the slate. (a bunch of different noises were tested-SK) The researchers were surprised to find that when low frequencies of the unpleasant scraping sound were removed (“filtered out”), the unpleasantness of the sound was reduced. On the other hand, when the high frequencies of the unpleasant scraping sound were filtered out, no effect was observed. For some reason, the low frequency part of the scrape is what sends chills up your spine.
You may be thinking, “So what? Why should the sound of fingernails on the chalkboard be so annoying?”. No one really knows the answer to this question. It is possible that there is some evolutionary significance to this type of sound. Apparently, the nail/chalkboard sound is very similar to the warning cry of some monkeys. The authors of the “Chilling Sound” paper suggested that it is possible, just possible, that the response to these annoying sounds is some “leftover” reflex from a common primate ancestor. This reflex may be built in to get our attention. It has even been suggested (in Medical Hypothesis, vol. 46, page 487, 1996) that our response to this harsh sound is a property of our inner ear leftover from a fish lateral line system. Maybe…maybe not. I do know a sound that is even more annoying than fingernails on a chalkboard…my alarm clock!
Oddly enough, the scraping on a blackboard is nowhere near as annoying to me as the sound of a nail clipper in action. That’s a sound that just seems to cut right through me.
Oh dear!