Ig Nobel Prize

Like many in (and out of) the scientific community, I'm aware of the Nobel Prize being one of the most honorable recognition of a scientist's career. Every year we applaud and appreciate the achievements and contributions (though most of the time, belatedly) of the Nobel Laureates in their respective fields. The Nobel Prizes awarded are for Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, and Peace; as well as an associated award named Prize in Economics. You can review the list of 2008 winners here.

What I wasn't aware of was the existence of Ig Nobel Prize, the parody of Nobel Prizes. Ten 'prizes' are awarded annually to commemorate achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think".

Now, before you think this is a joke or fiction, all the achievements are real scientific work published in peer-reviewed journals. I kid you not. It is a funnily serious matter. What I couldn't quite comprehend was how they obtained funding to do this kind of stuff, for example, awards for:

1991 Chemistry - Jacques Benveniste, for his persistent discovery that water, H2O, is an intelligent liquid, and for demonstrating to his satisfaction that water is able to remember events long after all trace of those events has vanished. Published in Nature 1988.

1993 Medicine - Nolan, Stillwell, and Sands, for their painstaking research report, "Acute Management of the Zipper-Entrapped Penis." Published in Journal of Emergency Medicine 1990.

1995 Psychology -Watanabe, Sakamoto, and Wakita, of Keio University, for their success in training pigeons to discriminate between the paintings of Picasso and those of Monet. Published in Journal of Experimental Analysis Behaviour 1995.

1997 Peace -Harold Hillman of the University of Surrey, for his lovingly rendered and ultimately peaceful report "The Possible Pain Experienced During Execution by Different Methods." Published in Perception 1993.

1998 Statistics -Bain and Siminoski for their carefully measured report, "The Relationship Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size." Published in Annals of Sex Research 1993.

1999 Managed Health Care - the late George and Charlotte Blonsky, for inventing a device to aid women in giving birth -- the woman is strapped onto a circular table, and the table is then rotated at high speed. US Patent #3,216,423.

2000 Chemistry - Marazziti, Rossi, and Cassano, for their discovery that, biochemically, romantic love may be indistinguishable from having severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. Published in Psychological Medicine 1999.

2001 Economics - Slemrod and Kopczuk, for their conclusion that people find a way to postpone their deaths if that that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax. Published in National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. W8158, 2001.

2002 Physics - Leike of the University of Munich, for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay. Published in European Journal of Physics 2002.

2003 Physics -Harvey et al of Australia, for their irresistible report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces." Published in Applied Ergonomics 2002.

2004 Biology - Wilson et. al, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting. "Pacific and Atlantic Herring Produce Burst Pulse Sounds." Published in Biology Letters 2003.

2005 Economics - Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.

2006 Physics - Audoly and Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces. "Fragmentation of Rods by Cascading Cracks: Why Spaghetti Does Not Break in Half". Published in Physical Review Letters 2005.

2007 Physics - Mahadevan (Harvard University) and Villablance, for studying how sheets become wrinkled. "Geometry and Physics of Wrinkling." Published in Physical Review Letters 2003.


And the ten Ig Nobel Laureates of 2008 are:

Archealogy - Araujo and Marcelino of Universidade de São Paulo, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo. Published in Geoarchealogy 2003.

Biology - Cadiergues, Joubert, and Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat. "A Comparison of Jump Performances of the Dog Flea, Ctenocephalides canis and the Cat Flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis." Published in Veterinary Parasitology 2000.

Chemistry - Umpierre, Hill, Anderson (Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and to Hong, Shieh, Wu, and Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not. Published in New England Journal of Medicine 1985, and Human & Experimental Toxicology 1987.

Cognitive Science - Nakagaki, Yamada, Kobayashi, Tero, Ishiguro, and Toth, for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles. "Intelligence: Maze-Solving by an Amoeboid Organism." Published in Nature 2000.

Economics - Miller, Tybur, Jordan of the University of New Mexico, for discovering that professional lap dancers earn higher tips when they are ovulating. "Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers; Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?" Published in Evolution and Human Behaviour 2007.

Literature - David Sims of UK, for his lovingly written study "You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations." Published in Organizational Studies Vol.26, 2005.

Medicine - Ariely (Duke University), Waber (MIT), Shiv (Stanford University) and Carmon (INSEAD), for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine. "Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy." Published in Journal of the American Medical Association 2008.

Nutrition - Zampini (University of Trento) and Spence (Oxford University), for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is. "The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips." Published in Journal of Sensory Studies 2004.

Peace - The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity. "The Dignity of Living Beings With Regard to Plants. Moral Consideration of Plants for Their Own Sake." ECNH.

Physics - Raymer and Smith (University of California), for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots. "Spontaneous Knotting of An Agitated String." Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2007.


Says who scientists aren't funny people?
Have a good laugh!



Visit the official Ig Nobel Prize website: Improbable Research

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