Wait, never heard of it? Fine, so what is Ig Nobel?
The Ig Nobel Prizes are basically the (humorous) alternative version of the Nobel awards. It seeks to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think” (Nature).
The awarding ceremony happened at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre. Ig Nobel is famous for being slighty chaotic but fun event where people throw paper planes and a little girl berates the winners.
“I’m a great believer in communicating science to non-scientists and I think humour is a good way of doing that; and for that reason I think the Ig Nobels are very positive,” Professor Darryl Gwynne told BBC News.
My top favorites are:
Biology Prize
The Biology Prize went to Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that a certain kind of beetle loves to have sex with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle (which must be the right color and texture, btw) Talk about mating error, big time.
Peace Prize
That’s pure swag right there. Mayor Arturas Zuokas of Vilnius Lithuania winning the award for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armoured tank.
Chemistry Prize
A team led from Shiga University, Japan, determined the ideal density of airborne wasabi to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm. Patent pending.
Other winners (source: BBC):
Physiology Prize: Anna Wilkinson, from the University of Lincoln, and colleagues for their study in the journal Current Zoology titled “No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise”.
Medicine Prize: Shared by two teams whose independent research jointly established that people make better decisions about some kinds of things, but worse decisions about other kinds of things‚ when they have a strong urge to urinate.
Psychology Prize: Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo, Norway, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.
Literature Prize: John Perry of Stanford University, US, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.
Physics Prize: Philippe Perrin and colleagues for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don’t.
Public Safety Prize: John Senders of the University of Toronto, Canada, for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him.
Mathematics Prize: Shared by a group of doom-mongers for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.
