CRI听力:Pineapple Science Award: Using Curiosity to Leverage the Earth

A walk in the rain can be romantic. But for a mosquito, a falling raindrop is like a car hitting a person. How can it survive?

This year's Pineapple Science Award for Physics has been taken by Dr. David L. Hu from the Georgia Institute of Technology, who discovered the little insects' secret: they have extremely strong exoskeletons and are good at Taichi, dropping a little with the raindrop to discharge the force.

Though it sounds funny, the discovery has practical meaning. Dr. Hu explains:

"There are a lot of interesting and small flying robots. The big question is how they survive outdoors where the air is moving very fast or there's heavy rain. The result has been found that the smaller the organism is, the more strong unforeseen advantages that really can't get destroyed even it is hit very hard."

The winner of 2006 Nobel Prize for physics, Professor George Smoot has been invited to announce the Pineapple physics award. Professor Smoot once played as himself as a guest on the popular TV series "the Big Bang Theory" and humorously mocked the show's Sheldon Cooper. He says he loves the research acknowledged by the Pineapple award:

"I think it's an interesting project, an interesting prize. It's a good thing to celebrating people doing interesting and different science. It relates what the science can be fun or not. Sometimes even the serious projects when you hear about it sound very funny."

The pineapple award for mathematics has been given to the Jinzi Huang Team from New Work University. It offers a long-sought answer to a question from childhood: How many licks does it take to reach the center of a lollipop? By formulating a theory for how flows cause dissolving and shrinking, the researchers calculated an estimate of about 1,000 licks.

Professor Ji Qi's team from Zhengzhou University in China's Henan province has won the biology or medical prize. The result of their research shows monkeys related to each other by blood look alike more.

And the chemistry award has been won by the Wang Liming Team from Zhejiang University who found that it is octopamine that helps fruit flies to look for food, because they have two different nervous systems, one for feeling hungry and one for looking for food.

Other winning research includes the discovery that people who love their names are happier, and the invention of a tattoo that can generate electricity.

With a slogan of Admiring Curiosity, the 4th Pineapple Science Awards have concluded. It has been called the Chinese version of the Ig Nobel Prize, and was jointly launched by China's most popular science and technology social network Guokr.com and Zhejiang Provincial Science and Technology Museum. It is designed to honor clever and imaginative research, or amusing and silly ideas that arouse public enthusiasm for science.

For CRI, I am Chi Huiguang reporting in Hangzhou.