Everyone knows about the history and significance of Nobel Prizes, founded by Alfred Nobel and been awarded since the year 1901. I’m sure that you would have heard about the Ig Nobel Prizes, that are awarded to those that make us laugh and also think – in a lighter vein!!
Just like beauty, comedy and lateral thinking are subjective. Those Ig Nobel recognized research papers that I’ve mentioned below are the ones that have made me laugh and think at the same time. There are numerous other research works that have received the coveted Ig Nobel prize, but to me they are just so-so.
So, here we go..
- Medicine – Alan Kligerman, 1991 - For inventing Beano, and also for his ground breaking work on anti-gas liquids that help prevent farting, and eventually, embarrassment. Well, we all would’ve needed this at one point or the other in our life!
- Peace – Pepsi-Cola Company, Philippines, 1993 - They announced a contest that will create a millionaire, but eventually fumbling and announcing the wrong number (winner!), thereby creating a 800,000-strong riot group.
- Mathematics – The Southern Baptist Church of Alabama, 1994 - They presented a county-by-county estimate of how many Alabama citizens may go to Hell if they fail to repent for their deeds, thanks to the mathematical measures of morality technique. Awe inspiring!
- Public Health – Martha Kold Bakkevig and Ruth Nielsen, 1995 - For their research on ‘Impact of Wet Underwear on Thermoregulatory Responses and Thermal Comfort in the Cold’. Well, they should also consider doing such research in tropical countries! A huge market out there..
- Physics – Robert Matthews, 1996 - Extensive work on Murphy’s Law, and also for demonstrating that the toast often falls on the buttered side. Looks like Murphy’s Law defies the laws of gravity!
- Peace - Harold Hillman of the University of Surrey, 1997 - For his report on ‘The Possible Pain Experienced During Execution by Different Methods.’ Ahem, no comments!
- Safety Engineering – Troy Hurtubise, of North Bay, Ontario, 1998 – For developing an armor suit that can resist grizzly bears. Looks like the adventurers of Discovery Channel and the National Geographic are using ‘em!
- Chemistry – Takeshi Makino, president of The Safety Detective Agency in Osaka, Japan, 1999 - For an infidelity detection spray called S-check (sanity check? or??!) that wives can use on their husbands’ underwear! This is what is call female-chauvinism. Poor Japanese males, they can’t even have accidents!
- Computer Science – Chris Niswander of Tucson, Arizona, 2000 - Invented PawSense, to detect and display if a cat had just walked across your computer keyboard. Kitten on the keys! Well, ‘guess there is also a software to detect kittens peeing on the keyboard – called PeeSense!?
- Medicine - Peter Barss of McGill University, Canada, 2001 - Presented a report on ‘Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts’. Very insightful, eh!? Should evaluate his research in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
- Public Health - Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, 2001 - for their medical discovery that adoloscents’ common activity is nose picking! Kinda got a flash back, I guess!?
- Mathematics – K.P. Sreekumar and G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University, India, 2002 – for their ‘Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants’. Since when did they start using elephants for agriculture? They should have estimated the TSA of the bull!
- Interdisciplinary Research -Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson, and Magnus Enquis of Stockholm University, 2003 - for their report ‘Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans’. Or should it be ‘Chicks prefer beautiful He-mans’?
- Public Health – Jillian Clarke of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, 2004 - scientifically investigated the validity of the five-second rule about whether it’s safe to eat food that’s been dropped on the floor. You ask me, I’ll tell you based on the ‘type’ of floor!
- Economics – The Vatican, 2004 - for outsourcing prayers to India. In the immediate future, the world dictionaries will have I’ndia’ as one of the main meanings of the word OUTSOURCE!
- Economics - Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005 - for his invention, Clocky! This is an alarm clock that runs away at the turn of the alarm, so that one has to physically get out of his bed to put it out. Of all the Ig Nobel Prizes, I think that this is the most practical, yet funny one!
- Nutrition – Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu of Tokyo, Japan, 2005 - For photographing and analyzing every meal that he had for more than 34 -years! Gosh, it all stopped with photographing just his meals!!
- Peace – Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, 2006 - for inventing an electro-mechanical teenager repellent. Phew! how could one think this way?
- Medicine – Dan Meyer and Brian Witcombe, 2007 - for their inevitable study on the side-effects of swallowing swords. LOL, they have a very small market to deal with – the magicians!
- Physics – Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith, 2008 - they proved that heaps of string or hair will, of course, tangle! I believe that this research would have costed literally nothing, excepts for a few strangs of hair – yours and mine!
Well, I’m already hunting the Internet to find some improbable research that is happening, so that I could recommend it to the Ig Noble Prize committee for the year 2009. There are, of course, interesting and beautiful things happening around us, other than bomb blasts and terror attacks.
Prize list source: Wikipedia
Tags: Ig Nobel, improbable, interesting, investigate, paper, prize, research
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I love it! And sadly, I recognize #14 as a science fair experiment done by high school students with the help of our lab. We used the standard ceramic tile floor….oh, and there is largely no difference in the contamination with relation to time, but surface area and moisture content of foodstuff was significantly correlated to numbers of bacterial colonies. gotta love it….
LOL! Probably, the research would add more value when done on a regional-scale, spanning at least a dozen countries. What say you?