Boiled Egg Cracks 2015 Ig Nobel Awards List

The 25th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony was held at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre Thursday.

Weird science is not just an American thing of course; Ig laureates come from all over the globe. It’s fair to say that receiving an Ig Nobel prize won’t be a massive help in terms of future funding, pushing hard that old expression that “any publicity is good publicity”. It’s painful. Getting stung on the nose is a whole body experience.

There were more winners on the night, ranging from a chicken dressed as a dinosaur (video later…) to the discovery of the word ‘huh?’.

The second Physiology and Entomology Prize victor was Michael L. Smith, “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)”. The experiment was meant to see if birds, which share many common traits with their reptilian ancestors, could provide clues about dinosaur locomotion.

Chemistry: The invention of a chemical process for that partially un-boils an egg.

Anthropologist Elisabeth Oberzaucher, who was lead author of the study published in PLOS One, said: ‘We were as conservative as possible with our calculations and Moulay could still achieve this outcome’.

The maths behind how a North African emperor from the 17th century fathered 888 children in just 30 years.

Not all of the research into the human body looked at pain and waste excretion however, with the winners of the medicine prize finding that kissing and other rather intimate activities can solve a number of health issues.

Mark Dingemanse from Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands. Among other honorees were a trio of linguists who discovered that nearly every language in the world uses the word “huh” as a fallback and business researchers who determined that corporate executives take less professional risk if they had lived through natural disasters during childhood.

While the Ig Nobels are shamelessly tongue-in-cheek, the science they mockingly celebrate does sometimes have a positive, practical impact on humanity.

For example, Sara Lewis, a professor of evolutionary and behavioral ecology at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, had this to say about her years spent researching lightning-bug sex: “Female fireflies favor fancy, food-filled flashes”.

If you’re a fan of the eccentric, visit the Ig Nobel website for plenty more scientifically-proven weirdness.