The 26th annual event featured a paper airplane air raid and four real Nobel laureates. Each victor was given a $10 trillion Zimbabwean bill (worth about 40 cents in U.S. money).
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A British man who lived as a goat for three days is among the winners of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes for scientific research.
Mr Sjoberg’s books have been a hit in his homeland, and the first volume’s English translation, The Fly Trap, has earned rave reviews.
“There was this tension which I hadn’t kind of noticed before and then one or two of the goats started tossing their horns around and I think I was about to get in a fight”, he said.
“It’s like the weirdest f-ing thing that you’ll ever go to.it’s a collection of, like, actual Nobel Prize winners giving away prizes to real scientists for doing f’d-up things.it’s awesome”, Amanda Palmer, a performer and writer, was quoted as saying on the Ig Nobel website.
Elsewhere, Ahmed Shafik was awarded a gong for his work dressing rats in trousers.
Timeliness is also of limited consideration: The Ig Nobel Reproduction Prize went to the late Ahmed Shafik of Egypt, who died in 2007, for a 1993 paper documenting that rats who wore polyester or polyester-cotton blend trousers were less sexually active than those who wore cotton or wool trousers or conformed to rat norms and wore no garments of any kind.
Small groups of rats were dressed in underpants made from polyester, a polyester/cotton mix, or 100 per cent cotton or wool, and their sexual activity was monitored.
The study did not explain how he measured a rat’s waist and inseam. This was in recognition of Mr Foster’s stints living in the wild as a badger, otter, deer, fox, and even a bird; while Mr Thwaites was honoured for his attempts to live like a goat, which included creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs to become more goatlike.
“I was hunted down quite quickly”, he said.
Medicine Prize: Christoph Helmchen, Carina Palzer, Thomas Munte, Silke Anders, and Andreas Sprenger, for discovering that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body (and vice versa). Their study of more than 1,000 people between the ages of 6 and 77 _ “From junior to senior Pinocchio: A cross-sectional lifespan investigation of deception” _ found that young adults are the best liars.
And the psychology prize went to an worldwide group of researchers for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and then deciding whether or not to believe them.
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“We have never heard of anybody else who carefully spent time examining what happens sexually to rats if you put trousers on them”, Abrahams said.
