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.
