Friday, October 02, 2015

Ig Nobel Prizes for 2015

This year’s Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded in an annual ceremony in Harvard University’s Sanders Theater:
Chemistry prize - for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg.
Physics prize - for testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (bigger bladders gush faster on emptying).
Literature prize - for discovering that the word "huh?" (or its equivalent) seems to exist in every human language — and for not being quite sure why.
Economics prize - to the Bangkok, Thailand, Metropolitan Police, for offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes.
Medicine prize - for experiments to study the biomedical benefits or biomedical consequences of intense kissing (and other intimate, interpersonal activities).
Mathematics prize - 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 prize - 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 prize - 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 prize - Awarded jointly to two individuals: Justin Schmidt [USA, CANADA], 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 [USA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS], 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).
For a full description of recipients and journal references, see this link.

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