"The Stinker", the official mascot of the Ig Nobel Prizes

It's that yearly event that many scientists likely dread - the awarding of the IgNoble prizes for improbable research.

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology. Every year, in a gala ceremony in Harvard's Sanders Theatre, 1200 splendidly eccentric spectators watch the winners step forward to accept their Prizes. These are physically handed out by genuinely bemused genuine Nobel laureates.

The 23rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will happen happened on Thursday, September 12, 2013. The ceremony will be was webcast live. TICKETS for the ceremony are sold out. 

And, from The Scicurious Brain at Scientific American, here are the 2013 winners:

IgNobels 2013! And the Winners Are…

By Scicurious | September 12, 2013 

 

TONIGHT, the 2013 IgNobels Prizes were held in Saunders Theatre at Harvard University! Winners traveled at their own expense, and received the prize from the hands of…real Nobel Prize winners. This year the prizes were accompanied by a new Opera, “The Blonsky Device”. 

And the winners are…*drumroll*

MEDICINE PRIZE
“Auditory stimulation of opera music induced prolongation of murine cardiac allograft survival and maintained generation of regulatory CD4+CD25+ cells,” Masateru Uchiyama, Xiangyuan Jin, Qi Zhang, Toshihito Hirai, Atsushi Amano, Hisashi Bashuda and Masanori Niimi, Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery, vol. 7, no. 26, epub. March 23, 2012.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE
REFERENCE: “‘Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder’: People Who Think They Are Drunk Also Think They Are Attractive,” Laurent Bègue, Brad J. Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, Medhi Ourabah, British Journal of Psychology, epub May 15, 2012.

JOINT PRIZE IN BIOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
REFERENCE: “Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation,” Marie Dacke, Emily Baird, Marcus Byrne, Clarke H. Scholtz, Eric J. Warrant, Current Biology, epub January 24, 2013. The authors, at Lund University, Sweden, the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and the University of Pretoria 

SAFETY ENGINEERING PRIZE
The late Gustano Pizzo [USA], for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers — the system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane’s specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival. 

US Patent #3811643, Gustano A. Pizzo, “anti hijacking system for aircraft”, May 21, 1972.

PHYSICS PRIZE
REFERENCE: “Humans Running in Place on Water at Simulated Reduced Gravity,” Alberto E. Minetti, Yuri P. Ivanenko, Germana Cappellini, Nadia Dominici, Francesco Lacquaniti, PLoS ONE, vol. 7, no. 7, 2012, e37300.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE
REFERENCE: “Plant Biochemistry: An Onion Enzyme that Makes the Eyes Water,” S. Imai, N. Tsuge, M. Tomotake, Y. Nagatome, H. Sawada, T. Nagata and H. Kumagai, Nature, vol. 419, no. 6908, October 2002, p. 685.

ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE
REFERENCE: “Human Digestive Effects on a Micromammalian Skeleton,” Peter W. Stahl and Brian D. Crandall, Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 22, November 1995, pp. 789–97.

PEACE PRIZE
Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, AND to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.

PROBABILITY PRIZE
REFERENCE: “Are Cows More Likely to Lie Down the Longer They Stand?” Bert J. Tolkamp, Marie J. Haskell, Fritha M. Langford, David J. Roberts, Colin A. Morgan, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, vol. 124, nos. 1-2, 2010, pp. 1–10.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE
REFERENCE: “Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam,” by Kasian Bhanganada, Tu Chayavatana, Chumporn Pongnumkul, Anunt Tonmukayakul, Piyasakol Sakolsatayadorn, Krit Komaratal, and Henry Wilde, American Journal of Surgery, 1983, no. 146, pp. 376-382.

In the words of the wonderful Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of “Annals of Improbable Research,” “If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel Prize tonight — and especially if you did — better luck next year.”

I will be writing individual posts for all winners over the next few days!! Look forward tomorrow to more from the IgNobel Prizes!!!

 

About the Author: Scicurious is a PhD in Physiology, and is currently a postdoc in biomedical research. She loves the brain. And so should you. Follow on Twitter @Scicurious.

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The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

The 2012 IgNoble Prizes

Via Scientific American, here are this year's winners of the IgNoble Prizes for research that makes you laugh . . . and then think.

ANNOUNCING the 2012 IGNOBEL PRIZES! 

By Scicurious | September 20, 2012

And such prizes they are. As master of ceremonies and organizer of the IgNobels, Marc Abrahams, famously says at the end of each ceremony: “If you didn’t win an IgNobel prize this year – but especially if you did – better luck next year.” And while the winners this year went in for some truly silly studies, they papers they produced also made some important contributions. And so here we present this year’s winners for the papers that most make you laugh, and then make you think.

Take it away, press release:

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE

Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan [THE NETHERLANDS] and Tulio Guadalupe [PERU, RUSSIA, and THE NETHERLANDS] for their study “Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller”

REFERENCE: “Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation,” Anita Eerland, Tulio M.

Guadalupe and Rolf A. Zwaan, Psychological Science , vol. 22 no. 12, December 2011, pp. 1511-14.

“Leaning to the left makes it look smaller!” “That’s what she said”

PEACE PRIZE

The SKN Company [RUSSIA], for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.

REFERENCE: http://www.skn-nd.ru/products_en.html

Ammo is a girl’s best friend.

ACOUSTICS PRIZE

Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada [JAPAN] for creating the SpeechJammer — a machine that disrupts a person’s speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.

REFERENCE: “SpeechJammer: A System Utilizing Artificial Speech Disturbance with Delayed Auditory Feedback”, Kazutaka Kurihara, Koji Tsukada, arxiv.org/abs/1202.6106. February 28, 2012.

We’ve been…JAMMED.

NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE

Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford [USA], for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.

REFERENCE: “Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction,” Craig M. Bennett, Abigail A. Baird, Michael B. Miller, and George L. Wolford, 2009.

REFERENCE: “Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Multiple Comparisons Correction,” Craig M. Bennett, Abigail A. Baird, Michael B. Miller, and George L. Wolford, Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-5.

This study has all the personality of a dead fish. In a good way.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE

Johan Pettersson [SWEDEN and RWANDA]. for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden,

people’s hair turned green.

He DYED HIS BEARD GREEN for the ceremony! This man is DEDICATED.

LITERATURE PRIZE

The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of

a report about the report about reports about reports.

REFERENCE: “Actions Needed to Evaluate the Impact of Efforts to Estimate Costs of Reports and Studies,” US Government General

Accountability Office report GAO-12-480R, May 10, 2012.

(What? Sorry. I feel asleep after the first report on the report. Was there another report?)

PHYSICS PRIZE

Joseph Keller [USA], and Raymond Goldstein [USA and UK], Patrick Warren, and Robin Ball [UK], for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.

REFERENCE: “Shape of a Ponytail and the Statistical Physics of Hair Fiber Bundles.” Raymond E. Goldstein, Patrick B. Warren, and Robin C. Ball, Physical Review Letters, vol. 198, no. 7, 2012.

REFERENCE: “Ponytail Motion,” Joseph B. Keller, SIAM [Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics] Journal of Applied Mathematics, vol. 70, no. 7, 2010, pp. 2667–72.

Let it also be noted that Joeseph Keller received TWO prizes today, the second is his long-awaited recognition on the physics of teapots that drip. As an ardent tea drinker, I thank this awesome guy.

FLUID DYNAMICS PRIZE

Rouslan Krechetnikov [USA, RUSSIA, CANADA] and Hans Mayer [USA] for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.

REFERENCE: “Walking With Coffee: Why Does It Spill?” Hans C. Mayer and Rouslan Krechetnikov, Physical Review E, vol. 85, 2012.

Answering the question of scientists the world over, as to why you cannot freakin’ walk with your dang coffee.

ANATOMY PRIZE

Frans de Waal [The Netherlands and USA] and Jennifer Pokorny [USA] for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.

REFERENCE: “Faces and Behinds: Chimpanzee Sex Perception” Frans B.M. de Waal and Jennifer J. Pokorny, Advanced Science Letters, vol. 1, 99–103, 2008.

(I would know that butt anywhere)

MEDICINE PRIZE

Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti [FRANCE] for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.

REFERENCE: “Colonic Gas Explosion During Therapeutic Colonoscopy with Electrocautery,” Spiros D Ladas, George Karamanolis, Emmanuel Ben-Soussan, World Journal of Gastroenterology, vol. 13, no. 40, October 2007, pp. 5295–8.

REFERENCE: “Argon Plasma Coagulation in the Treatment of Hemorrhagic Radiation Proctitis is Efficient But Requires a Perfect Colonic Cleansing to Be Safe,” E. Ben-Soussan, M. Antonietti, G. Savoye, S. Herve, P. Ducrotté, and E. Lerebours, European Journal of

Gastroenterology & Hepatology, vol. 16, no. 12, December 2004, pp 1315-8.

And over the next few days, Sci will be BLOGGING every single one of these fantastically special finds. So keep your eyes peeled for a full WEEK of weird science!! Stay Tuned!

About the Author: Scicurious is a PhD in Physiology, and is currently a postdoc in biomedical research. She loves the brain. And so should you. Follow on Twitter @Scicurious.

More »

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.