When David Hu from the Georgia Institute of Technology saw a mosquito braving heavy rain to land on a man's face, the question in his mind was how do the pests survive an onslaught of raindrops, each more than 50 times its weight?
Hu and his colleagues spent years solving the mystery. By observing mosquito-raindrop collisions with high-speed cameras, they found the mosquito is protected by a strong exoskeleton and can perform a dive upon impact with a raindrop to lighten its force.
The study won Hu a Pineapple Science Prize for physics in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, at the weekend.
Launched in 2012 to honor imaginative research and arouse public enthusiasm for science, the Pineapple Prize is so named because of the difficulty of peeling the fruit, its inexpensive price and popularity among ordinary people.
The mathematics prize went to Huang Jinzi and his team from New York University, whose math models answered a long-sought question from childhood: "How many licks does it take to finish a lollipop?"
It was initially an experiment on how water currents dissolve solids, using hard candy as a subject, but the theory developed from the experiment was later used to answer the lollipop conundrum — a lollipop with a diameter of a centimeter can be licked 1,000 times, researchers found.
"It was actually a very serious and solemn mathematics study," Huang told reporters. "But I'm happy about winning this prize, as it has made more people interested in hydromechanics."
The invention prize was awarded to Jia Wenzhao and his colleagues from the University of California, San Diego, who invented a device that can generate electricity from sweat — an extra second for your cellphone after several hours of sweaty exercise.
The current power production rate may be low, but Jia's team is optimistic about its potential in an eco-friendly future when you could generate power by taking the stairs instead of consuming it in an elevator.
Others on this year's prize list included proof that "loving one's own name makes one feel happier" (psychology prize) and that "a monkey's face looks like its mother's" (medicine and biology prize).
A blogger was also awarded a special prize for spending a year documenting the process of rotting meat.