Science and Humor - The Ig ® Nobel Prizes 2008
Photo by Todd Ehlers via Flickr
I have always loved the Ig Nobel prizes and this years winners are sure to make you chuckle.
| What are the Ig Nobel prizes? "The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology." ( Improbable Research ) |
Past winners include the inventor of the Karaoke machine, Daisuke Inoue who won the 2004 Ig Nobel peace prize and Ivette Bassa received the Ig Nobel chemistry prize for synthesizing bright blue Jell-O and Bernard Vonnegut's prize in Meteorology for his report, "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed."
2008 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
- Nutriton Prize - For making stale potato chips sound crisper and fresher than it is by electronically modifying the sound - Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK
- Biology Prize - Dog Fleas Can Out Jump Cat Fleas - Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France
Photo by csskk via Flickr - Medicine Prize - High priced fake medicine works better than low priced fake medicine - Dan Ariely of Duke University (USA), Rebecca L. Waber of MIT (USA), Baba Shiv of Stanford University (USA), and Ziv Carmon of INSEAD (Singapore)
Other winners investigated the effectiveness of coca-cola as spermicide, if ovulation can increase your tips for lap dancers, and more. View 2008 winner list.
The Ig Nobel Prizes are organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research.
Tags: award | humor | humour | Ig Nobel | prize | research | science
