介绍:
The 24th Ig Nobel prizes were announced on September 18.
9月18日，第24届搞笑诺贝尔奖评选结果揭晓。
The prizes annually award scientific research that “first makes people laugh and then makes them think.”
这些奖项每年颁发给“乍看引人大笑、而后发人深省”的科学研究。
The ceremony was food-themed including competitions such as Win-a-Date-With-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest.
颁奖典礼以食品为主题，设有诸如“与诺奖得主有约大赛”等比赛。
The awards for individual categories were presented at Harvard University by “a group of genuine, genuinely bemused1) Nobel Laureates.” And the winners are:
各个类别的奖项由“一群困惑不堪的正牌诺贝尔奖得主”在哈佛大学颁发。获奖者如下：
Physics
物理学
The prize went to Kiyoshi Mabuchi of Kitasato University for his work“measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that’s on the floor.”
该奖项颁发给了北里大学的马渕清资，因为他的研究“计算了当一个人踩到地板上的香蕉皮时，鞋与香蕉皮之间的摩擦力，以及香蕉皮与地板之间的摩擦力”。
Also tested were apple peels and orange skin—found to be less dangerous.
苹果皮和橘子皮也被拿来做测试——结果表明这两种果皮的危险性较小。
Apparently the banana peels form a sugary gel under pressure that makes them more slippery.
显然，香蕉皮在受到压力时会形成一种含糖的凝胶，导致香蕉皮变得更滑。
No humans were injured during the experiment.
实验过程中没有人受伤。
Psychology
心理学
Creatures of the night are, on average, “more self-admiring, more manipulative and more psychopathic2)” than people who habitually wake up early in the morning, according to Peter Jonason of the University of Western Sydney and colleagues.
西悉尼大学的彼得•约纳松及其同事研究发现，夜猫子通常比早上习惯早醒的人“更自恋，更有控制欲，更变态”。
More specifically, the team showed that people with the Dark Triad set of personality traits—narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism3)—would do well after dark, because people would generally pay less attention to their manipulations.
具体来说，该研究小组发现，具有三种黑暗性格特质(自恋、心理变态和精于权谋)的人在天黑之后状态较好，因为人们通常在天黑后就不太注意他们的权谋了。
Public health
公共卫生
Researchers from US, India, Japan and Czech Republic shared the prize “for investigating whether it was mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat.”
来自美国、印度、日本和捷克共和国的研究人员共同获得了该奖，“因为他们调查了养猫是否会给人带来精神上的危害”。
Cats rule the internet, but these researchers revealed that owning a pet cat is
associated with some personality changes, including lowering intelligence in men and feeling less guilt in women.
互联网已经是猫的天下，但是这些研究人员发现，养宠物猫与人的某些性格变化相关，包括男性智商的降低和女性内疚感的减少。
Two different teams won this prize.
两个不同的小组获得了这个奖项。
One focused on a cat-borne parasite that can infect humans and is known to manipulate the behaviour of its victims;
一个小组重点研究猫身上的一种寄生虫，这种寄生虫能感染人类，而且已经发现能操纵患者的行为；
the second looked at whether depression correlated with being bitten by cats.
第二个小组研究了抑郁症与被猫咬伤之间是否存在相关性。
Neuroscience
神经科学
Kang Lee at the University of Toronto and colleagues bagged the neuroscience prize “for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.”
多伦多大学的李康及其同事将神经科学奖收入囊中，“因为他们试图了解在面包片上看到耶稣面孔的人的大脑活动”。
Their results show that this behaviour is quite normal: The human brain is wired to quickly recognise faces in things with slight suggestions of one, no matter whether they are on a dog’s behind or on a naan bread4).
他们的研究结果表明这种行为很正常：人类的大脑能在稍具面孔特征的事物上很快辨认出面孔，无论这些面孔是在狗屁股上，还是在印度烤饼上。
To find the regions of the brain involved in this, the researchers created a bunch of images of random noise , stuffed participants in an MRI tube, and told them that half of the images contained a face (they did a separate study where they were told they contained a letter).
为了发现与此相关的大脑区域，研究人员制作了一批带有随机噪声的图像，把参与者推入核磁共振仪，并告诉他们有一半的图像中含有一张脸(他们还做了另一项研究，参与者被告知图像中含有一个字母)。
Over a third of the time, the subjects thought they saw a face.
在超过三分之一的情况中，受试者都认为自己看到了一张脸。
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