Winning a Nobel Prize the Easy Way

Generally speaking, if you want to garner a Nobel Prize, you will need to roll-up your sleeves, and hit the lab for a few years.  You may need to crunch some numbers, drill holes deep into the Earth, or juggle deadly infectious diseases in an isolation chamber.

Or, there is another way.

You can bypass all that perplexing and time-consuming stuff and simply make an alligator breath helium and then see if it will talk in a high, Micky Mouse voice like your high school buddy, Mikey did.

We are talking “breakthrough science” done the easy way.

The Nobel Prize in question was awarded in the field of acoustics.  According to the researchers involved: “Our question was whether alligators have vocal tract resonances like human speech,” said biologist Tecumseh Fitch, a member of the research team, who came from Austria, Sweden, Japan, the United States and Switzerland. “The hard part is getting an alligator to breathe helium.”

The “team” managed to overcome this challenge by forcing a female Chinese alligator into an airtight chamber and pumping in helium.  The helium—which makes sound travel faster—accounts for the altered sounds.

According to an article from Reuters: “The alligator on helium did not squeak, but let out a belch.”

Obviously, that is enough for a Nobel Prize in the year 2020

—Mitchell Hegman

Source: Reuters