有一些日本生物学家绘画奶牛来抵御苍蝇，在多哥的彩虹蜥蜴对四奶酪披萨的喜爱，美国儿科医生发现大蒜会使母乳对婴儿更具吸引力，而荷兰研究人员发现酒精降低了外语技能 - 尽管它使水果蝙蝠在飞行中留下了bumbling。还有一位历史学家追踪了他的缩略图增长已有35年了，物理研究人员探索了面食酱的奥秘。看来，赢得臭鞋的胜利只是为印度研究人员提高了标准。库马尔先生说：“除了认可之外，这给我们带来了负担 - 我们现在必须对人们通常不考虑的事情进行更多研究。提出问题。”换句话说，今天的臭味运动鞋可能是明天的开创性科学。在Instagram，YouTube，X和Facebook上关注BBC新闻印度。我们的膝盖可以说是我们最重要的关节之一，但也是最不受欢迎的关节之一。科学告诉我们，现在投入一些工作，以后会付出回报。世界上最神秘，最难以捉摸的兰花生活在澳大利亚。科学家们正试图挽救这一植物学奇迹，从而完全灭绝。大肠杆菌如何成为科学家的重要工具？有些人报告说，在减少咖啡因摄入量的几天内经历了更加生动的梦想。这是怎么回事？首先在古希腊提出了这四种“幽默”性格类型，塑造了我们数千年来如何看待自己，而今天仍然看起来很奇怪。几乎每个家庭都有至少一双鞋子，这些鞋子不可能忽略。将其乘以家庭的鞋类价值，将它们叠放在架子上，而您的家庭设计问题既刺激又普遍。两位印度研究人员认为这不仅仅是关于臭味 - 这是关于科学的。他们着手研究臭味的鞋子如何影响我们使用鞋架的经验，并在这样做的过程中进入了神圣的 - 搞笑 - IG诺贝尔奖的大厅，这是一个愚蠢但有创造力的科学努力，这是一个嘲讽的奖项。现年42岁的维卡什·库马尔（Vikash Kumar）是德里郊外的湿婆纳达尔大学设计助理教授，在本科生中教了29岁的萨尔萨克·米塔尔（Sarthak Mittal）。正是在大学，两个人首先击中了研究臭鞋的想法。米塔尔（Mittal）先生说，他经常注意到他的宿舍走廊衬有鞋子，经常留在双子共享房间外。最初的想法很简单：为什么不为学生设计一个时尚的美学鞋架？但是，随着他们更深入的挖掘，真正的罪魁祸首出现了 - 这不是混乱，而是在户外推动鞋类的恶臭。米塔尔（Mittal）说：“这与空间或缺乏鞋架无关 - 有足够的空间。问题是经常出汗，并且不断使用鞋子使它们臭。”因此，两人开始在大学旅馆进行一项调查，问一个真正的人类问题：如果我们的运动鞋reek，这是否会破坏使用鞋架的整个经历？他们对149名大学生的调查 - 其中80％的男性 - 证实了我们大多数人已经知道的东西，但很少承认：一半以上的人对自己的鞋子或其他人的臭气感到尴尬，几乎所有人都把他们的鞋子放在家里的架子上，几乎没有人听说过现有的除臭产品。本土黑客 - 鞋子里的茶袋，撒上小苏打，喷洒除臭剂 - 没有切割。然后，两位研究人员转向科学。他们从现有研究中知道的是罪魁祸首，是kytococcus sententarius，这是一种在出汗的鞋子上繁衍生息的细菌。他们的实验表明，短暂的紫外线杀死了微生物并消除了臭味。作者在论文中指出：“在印度，几乎每个家庭都有一种或另一种类型的鞋架，并且有一个使鞋子闻起来的架子可以带来良好的体验。”他们看到“臭鞋子是重新设计传统鞋架以获得更好的用户体验的机会”。结果？不是您的平均人体工程学纸 - 只是一种令人愉悦的奇怪想法：带有UVC轻型鞋架的原型，它不仅是存放鞋子，而且可以对其进行消毒。 （紫外线覆盖了一个频谱，但只有C频段具有杀菌特性。）对于实验，研究人员使用了大学运动员穿的鞋子，该鞋子具有明显的气味。由于细菌堆积在脚趾附近最大，因此UVC的光聚焦在那里。该研究测量了与暴露时间的气味水平，发现仅2-3分钟的UVC治疗就足以杀死细菌并消除臭味。这并不简单：太多的光意味着太多的热量最终燃烧了鞋橡胶。研究人员不仅将UVC管灯指向鞋子，并希望最好 - 他们每次测量。一开始，气味被描述为“强烈，刺激性，腐烂的奶酪般”。两分钟之内，它跌至“极度低，轻度燃烧的橡胶气味”。到了四分钟，犯规的恶臭就消失了，取而代之的是“平均燃烧橡胶”的气味。六分钟后，鞋子保持无潮，舒适凉爽。但是将其推得太远 - 10到15分钟 - 鞋子变热时，气味让位于“坚固的燃烧橡胶”，证明即使在科学中，时机也是一切。最后，两者提出了一个装有UVC管灯的鞋子。直到美国IG诺贝尔奖引起注意并取得联系之前，这一切都没有。这位34岁的IG诺贝尔奖由《哈佛拉德克利夫集团》（Harvard-Radcliffe Groups）共同主持，并由《不可能的研究》杂志组织，每年34岁的IG诺贝尔奖颁奖奖项，目的是“让人们发笑，然后思考……庆祝不寻常的想象力”。库马尔先生说：“我们对奖品一无所知。” “那是一张旧的2022年纸 - 我们从来没有在任何地方发送过。IG诺贝尔团队刚刚找到我们，打电话给我们，这本身使您发笑和思考。” “该奖项不是关于认证研究，而是庆祝研究 - 科学的有趣方面。大多数研究都是出于热情而完成的一项不幸的工作，这也是一种普及它的方式。”今年保持两家印第安人公司是一群令人愉悦的赢家。
How smelly shoes inspired India's Ig Nobel prize-winning study
Almost every household has at least one pair of shoes whose odour is impossible to ignore. Multiply that by a family's worth of footwear, stack them on a rack, and you have a domestic design problem that's as pungent as it is universal. Two Indian researchers decided this wasn't just about stink - it was about science. They set out to study how foul-smelling shoes shape our experience of using a shoe rack, and in doing so, stepped into the hallowed - and hilarious - halls of the Ig Nobel Prize, a tongue-in-cheek award for silly but inventive scientific endeavour. Vikash Kumar, 42, assistant professor of design at Shiv Nadar University outside Delhi, taught Sarthak Mittal, 29, during his undergraduate years. It was at the university that the two first hit upon the idea of studying smelly shoes. Mr Mittal says he often noticed his hostel corridors were lined with shoes, often left outside twin-sharing rooms. The initial idea was simple: why not design a sleek, aesthetic shoe rack for students? But as they dug deeper, the real culprit emerged - it wasn't clutter but the foul smell that was driving the footwear outdoors. "It wasn't about space or a lack of shoe racks - there was plenty of room. The problem was frequent sweating and the constant use of shoes that made them smelly," says Mr Mittal, who now works for a software company. So the two embarked on a survey in the university hostels asking a truly human question: if our sneakers reek, doesn't that ruin the entire experience of using a shoe rack? Their survey of 149 university students - 80% of them male - confirmed what most of us already know but rarely admit: more than half had felt embarrassed by their own shoes or someone else's stink, nearly all kept their footwear in racks at home, and hardly anyone had heard of existing deodorising products. Homegrown hacks - tea bags in shoes, sprinkling baking soda, spraying deodorant - weren't cutting it. The two researchers then turned to science. The culprit, they knew from existing research, was Kytococcus sedentarius, a bacterium that thrives in sweaty shoes. Their experiments showed that a short blast of ultraviolet light killed the microbes and banished the stink. "In India, almost every household has a shoe rack of one type or the other, and having a rack which keeps the shoes smell free would give a great experience," the authors noted in their paper. They saw "smelly shoes as an opportunity for re-designing the traditional shoe rack for a better user experience". The result? Not your average ergonomics paper - and just the kind of delightfully oddball idea: a prototype for a UVC light-equipped shoe rack that doesn't just store shoes but sterilises them. (UV covers a spectrum, but only the C band has germicidal properties.) For the experiment, the researchers used shoes worn by university athletes, which had a pronounced odour. Because bacterial build-up is greatest near the toe, the UVC light was focused there. The study measured odour levels against exposure time, and found that just 2–3 minutes of UVC treatment was sufficient to kill the bacteria and eliminate the foul smell. It was not simple: too much light meant too much heat which ended up burning the shoe rubber. The researchers didn't just point a UVC tube light at the shoes and hope for the best - they measured every whiff. At the start, the odour was described as "strong, pungent, rotten-cheese-like". Two minutes in, it had dropped to "extremely low, mild burnt-rubber smell". By four minutes, the foul stench was gone, replaced by an "average burnt rubber" scent. Six minutes later, the shoes remained odour-free and comfortably cool. But push it too far - 10 to 15 minutes - and the odour gave way to "strong burnt rubber" while the shoes got hot, proving that even in science, timing is everything. In the end, the two proposed a shoe-rack fitted with a UVC tube light. Nothing came of it until the US-based Ig Nobel Prize took notice and got in touch. Organised by the journal Annals of Improbable Research and co-sponsored by Harvard-Radcliffe groups, the 34-year-old Ig Nobel awards 10 prizes annually, aiming to ”make people laugh, then think… celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative”. "We had no idea about the prize," said Mr Kumar. "It was an old 2022 paper - we never sent it anywhere. The Ig Nobel team just found us, called us up, and that in itself makes you laugh and think." "The award isn't about certifying research but celebrating it - the fun side of science. Most research is a thankless job done out of passion, and this is also a way of popularising it." Keeping the two Indians company this year is a delightfully eclectic cast of winners. There are Japanese biologists who painted cows to ward off flies, rainbow lizards in Togo with a fondness for four-cheese pizza, US paediatricians who found garlic makes breast milk more appealing to babies, and Dutch researchers who discovered alcohol sharpens foreign-language skills - though it leaves fruit bats bumbling in flight. There's also a historian who tracked his thumbnail growth for 35 years, and physics researchers exploring the mysteries of pasta sauce. Winning for stinky shoes, it seems, has only raised the bar for the Indian researchers. "Beyond recognition, it's put a burden on us - we now have to do more research on things people don't usually think about. Ask questions," says Mr Kumar. In other words, today's smelly sneakers could be tomorrow's groundbreaking science. Follow BBC News India on Instagram, YouTube, X and Facebook. 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