“The prizes are meant to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine and technology”.
Advertisement
The 25th edition, held as usual at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, and as usual presided over by the magazine Improbable Research’s editor Marc Abrahams, recognised work done in describing pain, diagnosing appendicitis, the effects of intense kissing and more.
The awards mimic the Nobel Prizes, but with noble intent. Their aim was to test the theory that most mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds – plus or minus 13 seconds. Yang and her team hope that their findings, published in the journal PNAS, inspire smarter engineering for water tanks and reservoirs as well as fire hoses and water-filled backpacks.
Australian academics Professors Colin Rason and Callum Ormonde were among a group of scientists who picked up the chemistry prize for inventing a chemical recipe to partially unboil an egg. They have huge implications for cancer treatments, biotechnology and a broad range of food production processes, the researchers claimed.
While the process is much more complicated than it sounds, the odd concept of “unboiling an egg” was one of the main reasons this discovery was noticed by Ig Nobel judges.
They achieved this feat with a machine, called the Vortex Fluidic Device (VFD), which can return egg whites to their natural state.
Literature prize winners at the 25th annual ceremony at Harvard University were three linguists who discovered that nearly every language around the world used the word “huh” to check out something in conversation.
Over the course of decades of field research to study Hymenoptera, the taxonomic order of insects that includes bees, wasps, and ants, he developed what is fittingly known as the Schmidt sting pain index, building on research that debuted in a 1983 paper in the Archives of Insect Biochemistry and Physiology.
The winners of Ig Nobel prizes in 2014 included a team of Norwegian scientists that studied how reindeer react to a human dressed up like a polar bear (the reindeer totally fell for it and ran away).
The economics prize was a send-up, however, and went to the Bangkok Metropolitan Police, for offering to pay officers extra cash if they refused to take a bribe.
Advertisement
The biology prize went to the team which observed that when one attaches a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to how dinosaurs are believed to have walked.
