Poop knives, arachnophobic entomologists win 2020 Ig Nobels

Maybe this year's Ig Nobels, the spoof prizes for dubious but humorous scientific achievement, should have been renamed the Ick Nobels.

An anthropologist who tested an urban legend by fashioning a knife out of frozen human feces, and a man who found that spiders oddly give scientists who study insects the heebie-jeebies, are among the 2020 winners.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Thursday's 30th annual Ig Nobel ceremony was a 75-minute prerecorded virtual affair instead of the usual live event at Harvard University. Even so, it managed to maintain some of the event's traditions, including real Nobel Prize laureates handing out the amusing alternatives.

“It was a nightmare, and it took us months, but we got it done,” said Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research magazine, the event’s primary sponsor.

This year's winners also included a collection of world leaders who think they’re smarter than doctors and scientists, and a team of Dutch and Belgian researchers who looked at why chewing and other sounds people make drive us crazy.

Metin Eren has been fascinated since high school by the story of an Inuit man in Canada who made a knife out of his own excrement. The story has been told and retold, but is it true?

Eren and his colleagues decided to find out.

Eren, an assistant professor of anthropology at Kent State University in Ohio and co-director of the university’s Experimental Archaeology Lab, used real human feces frozen to minus-50 degrees Centigrade and filed to a sharp edge.

He then tried to cut meat with it.

“The poop knives failed miserably,” he said in a telephone interview. “There’s not a lot of basis empirically for this fantastic story.”

The study is a little gross but makes an important point: There are a lot of...