The winners of the biology prize for example have seemingly caught the attention of most for their interesting discovery that when a weight is attached to the rear of a chicken, it will walk similar to how we believe dinosaurs did when they roamed the earth.
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But his Ig Nobel prize is jointly awarded to Justin Schmidt, for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects.
Writing in the journal PeerJ, Mr Smith said: “For the most painful locations, sting depth may be important, because the skin is thinnest on the genitals, followed by the face”.
The three most painful places to be stung turned out to be the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft.
The chicken study was conducted to investigate the idea that birds are really surviving dinosaurs that managed to avoid being wiped out by a meteor impact 65 million years ago.
While the chemistry prize went to a team that put together a recipe that can partially un-boil an egg, and another noted that the word ‘huh?’ appears to be universal to all languages, although the researchers couldn’t conclude why.
But although Smith, from Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, carefully arranged for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body to learn about pain, he ended up sharing the gong with another researcher. While such work may, on the surface, seem completely pointless, it has been published by the American National Academy of Sciences and could help research into urinary problems or water storage. His most revolutionary finding was that by doing so, the chickens walk in the same way as bipedal dinosaurs like the T-Rex, or at least the same way paleontologists think dinosaurs walked.
Among the many though, one of the most scientifically significant research consisted in one research team’s ability to “unboil” an egg, which could prove incredibly useful in cancer research due to the proof that proteins can be “unbound”.
Ismael fathered the children during a roughly 30-year reign that ended in 1727.
A Slovakian-Japanese collaboration picked up the Ig for medicine by showing the health benefits of “intense kissing and other intimate personal acts”.
Like the 2006 entomology victor that showed malaria-infected mosquitos are attracted to the scent of Limburger Cheese.
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While the Ig Nobels are shamelessly tongue-in-cheek, the science they mockingly celebrate does sometimes have a positive, practical impact on humanity. Speaking at the ceremony Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Imrobable Research said: “If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel Prize tonight – an especially if you did – better luck next year”.
