The 25th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony was held in the Sanders Theatre at Harvard University.
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The disease is notoriously hard to diagnose, leading to a large proportion of both false positives-where patients undergo surgery they don’t need-as well as false negatives-where appendicitis is mistaken for gas or cramps and left untreated. 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).
Professor Raston said winning a Nobel Prize would be wonderful, but he was “very happy with an Ig”.
Step forward one Michael L Smith, who arranged for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different parts of his body to find out which areas were the most painful.
Chemistry: The invention of a chemical process for that partially un-boils an egg.
“It’s not what we set out to do, to unboil an egg, but it’s the way of explaining the science involved and helping the wider world realise the momentousness of it”.
The tarantula hawk, a type of wasp, is at the top of the list for a sting that’s “kind of like getting hit by a lightening bolt”, along with the bullet ant, which hits its victim with waves of pain for 12 to 24 hours, says Schmidt.
Smith’s odd and painful experience while conducting his research has not gone unnoticed as he was declared one of the winners of this year’s Ig Nobels, which honors scientific achievements that make people laugh and think.
The 2015 Ig Nobel prizes have been handed out, awarding the strangest and most apparently useless advances in science.
The nostril, the lips, and the shaft of the penis.
The literature prize went to Mark Dingemanse and team at the Max Planck Institute, in the Netherlands, who asked whether the word “Huh?” was used universally to ask a question. In what has come to be known as the Golden Rule, all mammals tend to urinate for about 21 seconds, the team reported a year ago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Medicine prize was awarded to two groups from Slovakia and Germany for ‘experiments to study the biomedical benefits of intense kissing, and other interpersonal activities’.
The awards are parody of the Nobel Prizes, and are awarded every year.
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Bangkok’s Metropolitan Police were honoured in this category for their valiant efforts at cleansing the police force of corruption and bribe-taking-by giving them cash. Another victor was a pair of German and Austrian mathematicians named Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer who investigated if the 17th century Moroccan king Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty could have fathered 600 children as the legend goes.
