Epress.am News from Armenia
The 21st Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony took place in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre last night. The Ig Nobel Prize (also known as the Shnobel award) honors achievements that “first make people laugh and then make them think,” according to the website of Improbable Research (Note: The magazine Annals of Improbable Research organizes the Ig Nobel Prizes.)
Former winners of the real Nobel prizes handed out the spoof awards, which have been awarded since 1991 and always a week before the actual Nobel Prizes are distributed.
The winners of this year’s Ig Nobel awards are as follows:
PHYSIOLOGY: Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl and Ludwig Huber for their study “No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise.”
CHEMISTRY: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi – a pungent horseradish – to awaken sleeping people and for applying this knowledge to invent a wasabi fire alarm.
MEDICINE: Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, Paul Maruff along with Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop for studying the effects of holding in urine, or, more specifically, how the urge to urinate affects decision-making.
PSYCHOLOGY: Karl Halvor Teigen for trying to understand why people sigh.
LITERATURE: John Perry for his theory of procrastination: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.
BIOLOGY: Daryll Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that certain kinds of beetles try to mate with certain kinds of Australian beer bottles called stubbies.
PHYSICS: Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru and Herman Kingma for trying to determine why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don’t.
MATHEMATICS: Assorted doomsday predictors throughout history for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.
PEACE: Arturas Zuokas for solving the problem of illegally parked cars by crushing them with an armored vehicle.
PUBLIC SAFETY: John Senders of the University of Toronto for his experiments in which a driver repeatedly has a visor flapped down over his face to see how distractions affect attention during highway driving.