Prior to the real thing, as it were, the Nobel Prizes, there are the annual the ig Nobel awards, a sort of spoof event presented by the Annals of Improbable Research. The research itself is absolutely genuine, and serious, it’s just that it is unlikely ever to be considered ‘worthy’ of a Nobel prize. Some good/whacky ones this year!
Psychology: Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan and Tulio Guadalupe, for their study titled Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller.
Peace: The SKN company, for using technology to convert old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.
Acoustics: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada for creating the SpeechJammer, a machine that disrupts a person’s speech by making them hear their own spoken words repeated back at them at a very slight delay.
Neuroscience: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford, for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere – even in a dead salmon.
Chemistry: Johan Pettersson for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people’s hair turned green.
Literature: The US government general accountability office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.
Physics: Joseph Keller, Raymond Goldstein, Patrick Warren and Robin Ball, for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.
Fluid dynamics: Rouslan Krechetnikov and Hans Mayer, for studying the dynamics of liquid sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.
Anatomy: Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny, for discovering that chimpanzees can identify specific other chimpanzees from seeing photographs of their rear ends.
Medicine: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan, for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimise the chance of their patients exploding.