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Not to be
confused with the august Nobel Prize, Thursday night saw the awarding of this
year’s Ig Nobel Awards, which are given to scientific studies that “make people
laugh, and then think.”
While the
studies are certainly offbeat, the science is real, but the awards are intended
to “celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest
in science, medicine, and technology.”
Here are the 2016
winners, awarded Thursday at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater:
The Reproduction
Prize went to the late Ahmed Shafik of Egypt, for studying the effects of
wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats, and for
conducting similar tests with human males. His 1993 paper documented that rats
who wore polyester or polyester-cotton blend pants were less sexually active
than those who wore cotton or wool pants or conformed to rat norms and wore no
garments of any kind. The paper suggested that "electrostatic fields"
created by polyester pants could play a role in impotence.
The Economics
Prize went to the British and New Zealand team of Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and
Shelagh Ferguson, for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a
sales and marketing perspective.
The Physics
Prize went to an international team (Gábor Horváth, Miklós Blahó, György
Kriska, Ramón Hegedüs, Balázs Gerics, Róbert Farkas, Susanne Åkesson, Péter
Malik, and Hansruedi Wildermuth), for discovering why white-haired horses are
the most horsefly-proof horses, and for discovering why dragonflies are fatally
attracted to black tombstones.
German company
Volkswagen took the Chemistry Prize for solving the problem of excessive
automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing
fewer emissions... whenever the cars are being tested.
The Medicine
Prize went to Germany’s Christoph Helmchen, Carina Palzer, Thomas Münte, Silke
Anders, and Andreas Sprenger, for discovering that if you have an itch on the
left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and
scratching the right side of your body (and vice versa).
The
international team of Evelyne Debey, Maarten De Schryver, Gordon Logan,
Kristina Suchotzki, and Bruno Verschuere won the Psychology Prize for asking a
thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those
answers.
The
American-Canadian team of Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr,
Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang took the Peace Prize for their scholarly
study called "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound
Bulls--t".
Two Brits shared
the Biology Prize. Charles Foster was honored for living in the wild as, at
different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and Thomas
Thwaites, for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to
move in the manner of goats, and spend three days roaming hills in the company
of a herd.