The awards you've been waiting for

The Nobel prizes will be announced in early October, but stealing a march on their "competition," last week at a ceremony in Boston the Ig Nobel prizes were announced to general hilarity and profound amazement at the lengths that some scientists will go to in their quest for knowledge.

The Ig Nobels are in their 26th year and every year at this time they honor some of the strangest research in all of science. The prize this year was Zimbabwean currency worth about forty cents in U.S. money and the prizes were given to the winners by some actual Nobel prize winning scientists.

Proving that there are no bounds on the curiosity of scientists, these were some of the winners this year:

• Egyptian urologist Ahmed Shafik investigated the effect that wearing trousers would have on male rats. He made trousers for his subjects in different kinds of materials including 100% polyester, 50/50% polyester/cotton, all cotton and all wool. He found that rats wearing polyester had significantly lower rates of sexual activity but that those wearing cotton or wool were relatively normal.
• A team from New Zealand and the UK studied the personalities of rocks. Yes, that's right - rocks. They determined this by asking 225 New Zealand students to describe what they perceived as the personality of various rocks.
• The biology award went to two Britons, one of whom created prosthetic limbs that allowed him to move like a goat and to live among goats and the second one who tried to live as a badger, an otter, a fox, and a stag. While living as a badger, the researcher ate worms, dug a hillside den, and tried to sniff out voles. The goat researcher infiltrated a herd in the Swiss Alps and spent three days eating grass, bleating, and stumbling over rocks.
• The psychology award was given to a team that studied liars. They asked 1,000 liars how often they had lied over the course of their life and rated how well they lied. They found that lying decreased with age, although they had to admit their their respondents might have been...uh...lying.   
• The peace prize was awarded to a team of philosophers who published a paper titled "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit." The group studied how people understand gibberish that has been presented as if it means something, and they came to the conclusion that "bullshit may be more pervasive than ever before."
• A group of German scientists earned the medicine prize by determining that if you have an itch on your left side, you can look into a mirror and scratch your right side to relieve it.
• A perception prize was awarded to Japanese researchers who tried to learn whether bending over and looking at things between your legs changes how they appear.
• Physics awards were given to researchers who found that white horses attract fewer horseflies and that dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones.
• The award for literature went to a Swedish author, Fredrik Sjoberg, who wrote a trilogy about collecting flies.  

Finally, the most surprising award was that for chemistry which was given to the automaker Volkswagen. The tongue-in-cheek citation for the award stated that it was given "for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electro-mechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested." They were given the nearly worthless Zimbabwean currency prize to help pay for their massive legal costs for cheating on emissions tests.

Gleeful absurdism and high satire were the mood of the night. Never let it be said that scientists don't have a sense of humor. 

Proof that science has a sense of humor

The eagerly awaited - well, I always look forward to them - Ig Nobel prizes in science were handed out this week. These are the prizes that began 23 years ago as a spoof of the somewhat more prestigious Nobel prizes that will be given out next month. The humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research organizes and sponsors the ten awards and the ceremony takes place at Harvard University around this time every year. The stated aim of the awards is to "first make people laugh, and then make them think." There's certainly a lot in this year's awards to make us think. And occasionally retch.

For example: The archaeology prize went to Brian Crandall and Peter Stahl for parboiling a dead shrew, then swallowing the shrew without chewing, and then carefully examining everything excreted during subsequent days just so they could determine which bones would dissolve inside the human digestive system and which bones would not. The sacrifices that some scientists are willing to make for their research!

Continuing with the excreta theme, a joint prize in biology and astronomy was awarded to a group of scientists who discovered that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way. Even insects that spend their time rolling up balls of poop can look at the stars. Who knew? Well, now we do, thanks to these scientists' selfless work.

The peace prize was awarded jointly to Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public and to the Belarus State Police for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.

In public health, the prize was given to a group of surgeons who described their medical techniques in a report entitled "Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam." Apparently, their techniques are recommended, except in cases where the amputated penis has been partially eaten by a duck. (Don't ask. You'll just have to read the report.)

In psychology, several researchers were recognized for their experiment which confirmed that people who are drunk tend to think that they are more attractive. Their paper was entitled "Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder."

A group of physicists won that category's prize by discovering that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond - if those people and that pond were on the moon. Sheldon and Leonard of "The Big Bang Theory" would be so proud!

Several scientists worked together in the field of chemistry to discover that the biochemical process by which onions make people cry is even more complicated than scientists previously realized. For that, they won a prize.

But I've saved my two favorites of this year's prizes for the last.

Bert Tolkamp, Marie Haskell, Fritha Langford, David Roberts, and Colin Morgan spent a lot of time closely observing cows and they discovered two things: (1.) The longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and (2.) Once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again. For this startling discovery, they won the probability prize.

And last but certainly not least, the late Gustavo Pizzo invented an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers. His system would drop the hijacker through trap doors, seal him into a package and drop the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane's specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to earth, where police, having been alerted, await his arrival. I think Mr. Pizzo may have watched a few too many James Bond movies. But what an imagination!

And imagination and innovation and the willingness to pursue an idea even if it seems crazy and the whole world laughs at you - that is what the Ig Nobels are all about.