Good day, dear Take in Mind readers! The topic of today’s post is the Ig Nobel Prize… Makes you smile? Laugh, maybe? Indeed, thanks to the media, which usually report exclusively on the funniest (if not to say, stupidest) scientific researches that were nominated for this award, many have developed an extremely ironic, even dismissive attitude towards the Prize. The author of this post was also no exception until he began to delve into the topic, and gradually his opinion began to change completely.
First, the motto of the award is “first make people laugh, and then make them think”. Indeed, despite the unusual and fun research topics, the authors propose non-standard and very original solutions to many fundamental problems. Secondly: many laureates and nominees are the most famous and respected scientific “giants”, leading experts in various fields of science. Some of the laureates (for example, the Russian-born Dutch-British physicist Andre Geim) were awarded both the Nobel and Ig Nobel prizes in different years.
Therefore, there is nothing ignoble or shameful neither for the nominees nor for the laureates! By the way, considering the increasing politicization and the very strange decisions regarding the Nobel Prize nominations in recent years, we personally do not know which of the awards scientists should be prouder of…
A few words about its history. The award was established in 1991 by Mark Abrahams and the Annals of Improbable Research magazine to “celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative, and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.” A silver foil medal, a comic figurine, and a certificate signed by three Nobel laureates, that’s what a proud laureate is awarded at the annual ceremony at Harvard University (and, of course, a monetary reward – in 2020 the amount was as much as a fabulous 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, which is about 1 US dollar)!
Several TV and radio stations broadcast the ceremony in several languages. A few days later, unofficial Ig Nobel lectures are held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the laureates explain their researches.
Now we want to present a small collection of the most (in our subjective opinion!) extraordinary works awarded the Ig Nobel Prize. We note that the task was really difficult – we like most of the nearly 200 awarded studies.
So, the Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to:
Habip Gedik and colleagues for testing which country’s paper money is best at transmitting dangerous bacteria (the Romanian Leu was found as best for the examined microorganisms to yield) (Economics, 2019)
Patricia Yang and colleagues for studying how, and why, wombats make cube-shaped faeces (Physics, 2019)
Christoph Helmchen and colleagues for discovering that if you have an itch on one side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching another side of your body (Medicine, 2016)
Evelyne Debey and colleagues for testing the correlation of age and lying proficiency (Psychology, 2016)
Bruno Grossi and colleagues for the study of dinosaur’ locomotion by the examination of movement of chicken with the attached weighted stick to their rear end (Biology, 2015)
Vlastimil Hart and colleagues for documenting that when dogs defecate and urinate, they prefer to align their body axis with Earth’s north–south geomagnetic field lines (Biology, 2014)
Marie Dacke and colleagues for discovering of uses of the Milky Way by dung beetles for navigation (Biology/Astronomy, 2013)
Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada for creating the system that disrupts a person’s speech by making them hear their own spoken words at a slight delay (Acoustics, 2012)
The groups from the Netherlands (Mirjam Tuk and colleagues) and Australia (Matthew Lewis and colleagues) for demonstrating that people make better or worse decisions about specific issues when they have a strong urge to urinate (Medicine, 2011).
Rebecca Waber and colleagues for demonstrating that expensive placebos are more effective than inexpensive placebos (Medicine, 2008)
The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity (Peace, 2008)
Patricia V. Agostino and colleagues for discovering that Viagra-treated hamsters recover from jetlag more quickly (Aviation, 2007)
Daniel M. Oppenheimer for his report “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly”. One of the key findings was that less intelligent authors tend to increase the complexity of their vocabulary (Literature, 2006)
Yukio Hirose for his investigation of a bronze statue, in the city of Kanazawa, that does not attract pigeons due to its arsenic content (Chemistry, 2003)
Andre Geim and Michael Berry for using magnets to levitate a frog (Physics, 2000)
Bernard Vonnegut for his study “Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed.” (Meteorology, 1997)
Jacques Benveniste for his discovery that water, H2O, is an intelligent liquid, and for demonstrating to his satisfaction that water is able to remember events long after all traces of those events have vanished (Chemistry, 1991)
P.S. How often have we convinced that what was recently considered impossible, fiction, fairy tale, ridiculous and unscientific nonsense (the list of epithets can be continued indefinitely), after some time was not only scientifically confirmed, but also opened completely new horizons for the scientific and technological progress?! Therefore, summarizing our today’s post, we really want to slightly paraphrase the famous classic quote: “Non-standard science is a funny thing, but there is a hint in it! And a good lesson for all of us!”
P.P.S. We decided to mention one more nomination, which our team recognized as a terribly stupid, but very funny one. 2020 Ig Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the governments of India and Pakistan, for “having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other’s doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door”… Bravo and applause!
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