Ig Nobel Awards

[bobAlike]

Here is the full list of prize winners: (Thanks to BBC News)

Chemistry - Callum Ormonde (University of Western Australia) and colleagues, for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg.

Physics - Patricia Yang (Georgia Institute of Technology, US) and colleagues, for testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds).

Literature - Mark Dingemanse (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands) and colleagues, for discovering that the word "huh?" (or its equivalent) seems to exist in every human language - and for not being quite sure why.

Management - Gennaro Bernile (Singapore Management University) and colleagues, for discovering that many business leaders developed in childhood a fondness for risk-taking, when they experienced natural disasters (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and wildfires) that - for them - had no dire personal consequences.

Economics - The Bangkok Metropolitan Police (Thailand) for offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes.

Medicine - joint award: Hajime Kimata (Kimata Hajime Clinic, Japan) and also Jaroslava Durdiaková (Comenius University, Slovakia) and her collagues, for experiments to study the biomedical benefits or biomedical consequences of intense kissing (and other intimate, interpersonal activities).

Mathematics - Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer (University of Vienna, Austria) for trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children.

Biology - Bruno Grossi (University of Chile) and colleagues, for observing that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked.

Diagnostic medicine - Diallah Karim (Stoke Mandeville Hospital, UK) and colleagues, for determining that acute appendicitis can be accurately diagnosed by the amount of pain evident when the patient is driven over speed bumps.

Physiology and entomology - Awarded jointly to two individuals: Justin Schmidt (Southwest Biological Institute, US) for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects; and to Michael L. Smith (Cornell University, US), for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are the least painful (the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm). and which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft).


My favourite has got to be the chicken walk like dinosaurs followed closely by the Thai police one.

Can our fellow Blondepokerers come up with any better?

[RED-DOG]

Lol. Those are brilliant.

[Doobs]

Physics - Tom McCready for his examination of the maximum amount of force that can be exerted on a scaffolding pole before rupture.  

[RED-DOG]

Physics - Tom McCready for his examination of the maximum amount of force that can be exerted on a scaffolding pole before rupture.  

Sigh....


Everybody is a comedian.

[bobAlike]

Physics - Tom McCready for his examination of the maximum amount of force that can be exerted on a scaffolding pole before rupture. 

That's the idea but you have to state the benefits of doing a test like this. i.e to test the thickness of Toms head.

[The Wycher]

To establish the exact force and angle to be applied to ensure a scaffolding pipe ruptures rather than bends.

[david3103]

 Biomechanics and Physics - Tony Kendall for establishing the length of time between thought and deed to ensure the achievement of a photograph of half a plane.

[bunnydas8888]

In case anyone was wandering what it would look like.