Ig Nobel Prize identifies freakish scientific projects

While the process is much more complicated than it sounds, the odd concept of “unboiling an egg” was one of the main reasons this discovery was noticed by Ig Nobel judges. The awarders’ take has been that “The Ig Nobel Prizes honour achievements that make people laugh, and then think“.

The 25th annual Ig Nobel awards were presented at Havard University on September 17. “Had they been here, we would have given them 10 trillion [Zimbabwean] dollars”.

Did you know that mammals all urinate for roughly the same amount of time – 21 seconds – regardless of their size… give or take 13 seconds? Yang and her team hope that their findings, published in the journal PNAS, inspire smarter engineering for water tanks and reservoirs as well as fire hoses and water-filled backpacks.

Australian scientists have been awarded the Ig Nobel prize in chemistry for making a device that can un-boil the boiled egg. The VFD could be used to fix misfolded proteins that are produced by recombined bacteria, for example, and has already been shown to improve the potency of a common cancer drug fourfold. According to the researchers, this method could revolutionise industrial and research production of proteins, which may be needed for a vast range of scientific and manufacturing processes.

The management prize went to researchers who found that many senior business leaders enjoyed risk taking because they had experienced – and survived – natural disasters in their childhood.

The Ig Nobel medicine prize went to two teams of researchers who conducted experiments to study the biological effects of intense kissing, which include decreasing skin allergies, and the literature prize was given to researchers who showed that the word “huh?” appears to exist in every language.

And, in an evening of laughs, the economics prize was particularly entertaining.

The biology prize went to the team which observed that when one attaches a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to how dinosaurs are believed to have walked.

The annual Ig Nobel Prize, celebrating the best of the worst academic research of the previous year , have just been handed out, answering that age-old question: is it more painful to get stung by a bee on the shaft of the penis or your top lip?