China Focus: China's Ig Nobel Prize honors weird experiments

Many great discoveries started with whimsical questions.

When David Hu from the Georgia Institute of Technology saw a mosquito braving heavy rain to land on a man's face, the question popping up in his mind was how do the pests survive an onslaught of raindrops, each more than 50 times its weight?

Such thoughts may be fleeting for many, but Hu and his colleagues spent years solving this mystery. By observing mosquito-raindrop collisions with high-speed cameras, they found the mosquito is protected by a strong exoskeleton and can perform a dive upon impact with a raindrop to lighten its force.

The study, believed to offer insight to the development of insect-sized flying robots, won Hu a Pineapple Science Prize for physics on Saturday evening in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province.

China's equivalent of Ig Nobel Prizes, the U.S. parody of the real Nobel, the Pineapple awards honor the curiosity behind amusing and amazing experiments. The fourth annual awards ceremony was co-hosted by Zhejiang Science Museum and Guokr.com, China's leading popular science website.

Its mathematics prize this year went to Huang Jinzi and his team from New York University, whose math models answered a long-sought question from childhood: "How many licks does it take to finish a lollipop?"

It was initially an experiment on how water currents dissolve solids, using hard candy as a subject, but the theory developed from the experiment was later used to answer the lollipop conundrum -- a lollipop with a diameter of 1 cm can be licked 1,000 times.

"It was actually a very serious and solemn mathematics study," Huang told Xinhua. "But I'm happy about winning this prize, as it has made more people interested in hydromechanics."

The invention prize was awarded to Jia Wenzhao and his colleagues from the University of California, San Diego, who invented a sticky device that can generate electricity from sweat. With its help, you can get an extra second for your cellphone by several hours of sweaty exercise.

The current power production rate may be low, but Jia's team is optimistic about its energy-saving potential in an eco-friendly future when you could generate power by taking the stairs instead of consuming it in an elevator.

Others on this year's prize list included proof that "loving one's own name makes one feel happier" (psychology prize) and that "a monkey's face looks like its mother's" (medicine and biology prize). A blogger also won a special prize for spending a year documenting a meat's rotting process.

Launched in 2012 to honor imaginative research and to arouse public enthusiasm for science, the Pineapple Prize is so named because of the difficulty of peeling the fruit, its inexpensive price and popularity among ordinary people.

"Half of our jury members are not trained in science, because we want to share with the public things they like," said Li Ruihong, curator of Zhejiang Science Museum.

This year, the list of winners was more international -- about one third of them are from overseas, said Executive Organizer Wang Yami, adding that the organizers have also been cooperating with those of the Ig Nobel. Endi