Flog It Blog It, Freaky Friday!

It is the 23rd year of the lg Nobel Awards which celebrates the weirdest and funniest experiments in the fields of science. The winners come from all over the world and Nobel laureates handed out the prizes during a ceremony at Harvard University, sponsored by science magazine Annals of Improbable Research. For the first time, the winners received cash prizes $10 trillion, but in Zimbabwe dollars, which means they'll receive around four U.S. dollars each. The inventor of the trillion dollar note, Gideon Gono, won the Ig Nobel Award in 2008.

Psychology: An experiment that found people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive.

Joint prize in biology and astronomy: An experiment that showed lost dung beetles can use the Milky Way to find their way home. 

Medicine: A study assessing the effect of listening to opera on heart transplant patients who are mice.

Safety engineering: An electro-mechanical system to trap an airplane hijacker by dropping him or her through a trap door, sealing him or her into a package and then dropping the packaged hijacker (with a parachute) to the ground where police will be waiting.

Physics: The discovery that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond - if both they and the pond were on the moon.

Chemistry: The discovery that the biochemical process by which onions make people cry is even more complicated than scientists previously realised.

Archaeology: Two researchers who parboiled a dead shrew, then swallowed it without chewing so they could examine their excrement to see which bones would dissolve in the human digestive system and which would not.

Peace: Belarus and its president, for making it illegal to applaud in public, and to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.

Probability: Researchers who discovered that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up, but that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again.

Have a fabulous freaky Friday all.