Counting nose hairs in cadavers, repurposing dead spiders and explaining why scientists lick rocks, are among the winning achievements in this year's Ig Nobels, the prize for humorous scientific feats, organizers announced Thursday. The 33rd annual prize ceremony was a prerecorded online event, as it has been since the coronavirus pandemic, instead of the past live ceremonies at Harvard University. Among the winners was Jan Zalasiewicz of Poland who earned the chemistry and geology prize for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks. “Licking the rock, of course, is part of the geologist’s and palaeontologist’s armoury of tried-and-much-tested techniques used to help survive in the field,” Zalasiewicz wrote in The Palaeontological Association newsletter in 2017. “Each winner (or winning team) has done something that makes people LAUGH, then THINK,” according to the “Annals of Improbable Research” website.

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Persons: Jan Zalasiewicz, ” Zalasiewicz, ___ Rathke Organizations: Harvard University, Palaeontological Association, United States, Harvard, Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, Radcliffe Society of Physics Locations: Poland, Licking, India, China, Malaysia, Marshfield , Vermont