The Ig Nobel Prize, a spoof (滑稽模仿）of the actual Nobel Prize, exists to award the 10 strangest research projects of the year that bring you fun and make you think. The following are three of them in 2019.

Medicine Prize: Pizza

It’s one of the world’s most popular foods. According to the Ig Nobel Medicine Prize winner, eating more pizzas can lower the risk of cancer and heart disease — if your pizza is loaded with fruits and veggies. These provide flavonoids (类黄酮）to fight against certain diseases. So, if you’re a pizza enthusiast, you now have one more reason to love it!

Economics Prize: Dirty Money

Paper money, the most frequently passed items on the planet, is known to pick up all kinds of bacteria. Which country’s currency is the dirtiest? An international team compared seven countries’ paper money. The Romanian Leu was the only one to carry all three types of bacteria tested. And the US Dollar was also a finalist. Perhaps this will make cashless payments more popular.

Biology Prize: Cockroach

Cockroaches (蟑螂) are well known for their survival abilities, but few folks know they can sense magnetic fields. More surprisingly, an international team found that dead cockroaches have more magnetic properties (磁'性)than live ones. That’s because magnetic properties decrease when the temperature gets higher. So if you can stand cockroaches, they may be good magnetic sensors (传感器）.

Growing up, Deka Ismail says she let labels define what she could be. “I was a black girl, from a refugee (难民) family,” Deka said. “It was as if I was only allowed to explore in this predetermined box.”

After a high school chemistry class inspired her to think about a career in science and gave her confidence in the field, Deka learned to live outside labels and began making big plans for her future. Now she is about to begin her freshman year at the University of California, planning to become a professor.

Born and raised in San Diego's City Heights neighbourhood, Deka is the daughter of a Somali refugee couple. While some might say Deka's success happened in spite of her background, she would say differently, that her experiences shaped her and inspired her to be the driven, young scientist that she is today.

When Deka was eight years old, her mother got a job by studying hard back in school in order to support the whole family. That made Deka realize that education could make a difference to one's life. She spent a lot of time in the library reading books, and didn't do many of the things her peers did, like partying or having romantic relationships.

“I always felt like I had to be the perfect girl for my family,” Deka said. “You have to not even do your best but two times better than everyone else. I felt like the whole world was waiting for me to mess up.”

Deka's efforts paid off. The summer before her senior year of high school, she was accepted to the American Chemical Society Project SEED Programme. “She brought both enthusiasm and focus,” Botham, a researcher at this research institute, recalled. “She arrived every day ready to work, ready to learn and ready to tackle new challenges regardless of whether or not she had done anything similar.”

When asked what advice she would give to others like her, Deka warned them not to underestimate themselves. “Don't tell yourself that scholarship is too big or this programme is too competitive or I'll never get into this school, ” she said. “I was not sure whether I could make it until I started seeing the acceptance letters rolling in.”

Today's world is not an easy adjustment for young adults. Key skill set for success is persistence (毅力), a characteristic that researchers say is heavily influenced by fathers. Researchers from Brigham Young University discovered that fathers are in a unique position to help their adolescent children learn persistence.

BYU professors Laura Padilla-Walker and Randal Day arrived at these findings after following 325 American families over several years. And over time，the persistence gained through fathers led to higher achievement in school.

"There are relatively few studies that stress the unique role of fathers，"Padilla-Walker said. "This research also helps to prove that characteristics such as persistence-which can be taught-are key to a child's life success.”

Researchers determined that dads need to practice an "authoritative" parenting style. Authoritative parenting is not authoritarian:rigid，demanding or controlling. Rather，an authoritative parenting style includes some of the following characteristics:children feel warmth and love from their father；responsibility and the reasons behind rules are stressed children are given an appropriate level of autonomy(自主权).

In the study，about 52 percent of the dads exhibited above-average levels of authoritative parenting. A key finding is that over time，children raised by an authoritative father were significantly more likely to develop persistence，which leads to better outcomes in school.

This particular study examined 11 to 14-year-olds living in two-parent homes. Yet the researchers suggest that single parents still may play a role in teaching the benefits of persistence，which is an avenue of future research.

Last year, the bushfires in Australia burned more than 12.35 million acres of land. At least 25 people were killed and 2000 homes destroyed. According to the BBC, that was the most casualties(伤亡) from wildfires in the country since 2009. The University of Sydney estimates that 480 million animals have died in South Wales alone.

Zeke Hausfather, an energy systems analyst and climate researcher at Berkeley Earth, said warmer temperatures and extreme weather made Australia more susceptible to fires and increased the length of the fire season. "The drier conditions combined with record high temperatures in 2019 created main conditions for the disastrous fires. Australia's fires were worsened by the combination of those two. 2019 was the perfect storm for being the warmest year on record for Australia and the driest year on record for Australia," Hausfather added on Friday.

Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, said warmer ocean temperatures are also contributed to more variable weather around the world. Trenberth believes that global warming contributed to energy imbalances and hot spots in the oceans, which can create a wave in the atmosphere that locks weather patterns in places, causing longer rain events in Indonesia, for example, and at the same time contributing to drought in Australia. He said that once an area experiences drought conditions for two months or more, it increases the risk of fires catching and spreading. Those changing weather patterns due to global warming make drought events longer.

Climate experts stress that climate change is not the only factor in the severity(严重) of wildfires. How land is managed can also impact the amount of fuel available for fires. Practices like controlled bums and other factors can impact the risk to people and property, such as warning systems and the type of development in a given area. Changing those policies has great potential to limit future damage from wildfires along with changes to how fire management resources are dispatched(派遣).