The Ig Nobel Prizes 2010

The Nobel Prizes have recently been announced in all their historic grandeur. However, in order to tickle the anatomically-absent funny-bone of humanity, the Ig Nobel prizes were conjured up in 1991. They are intended to celebrate and honour all kinds of research, however unusual they might be. Like every year, this year too the ceremony was held with a lot of fanfare in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. Like the Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobel prizes are awarded in a variety of categories. The winners are celebrated and at the end of the ceremony, paper planes are thrown onto the stage. Since the inception of the awards, the “Keeper of the Broom” has been Dr. Roy Glauber, a Nobel laureate in physics, who sweeps the stage clean of the planes (except for 2006 when he was in Stockholm receiving his Nobel Prize). The prizes are conducted by the journal “Annals of Improbable Research”. Although Ig Nobel Prizes appear to be a criticism of trivial research, they have actually led to breakthroughs in certain aspects. For example, the 2006 study showing that the malaria mosquito is equally attracted to Limburger Cheese and the smell of human feet earned the Ig Nobel prize. As a direct result of these findings, traps with that kind of cheese have been implemented in Africa to combat the menace of malaria. This year, the awards were awarded to the following recepients:
ENGINEERING: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.
MEDICINE: Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.
TRANSPORTATION PLANNING: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.
PHYSICS: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.
PEACE: Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.
ECONOMICS: The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.
PUBLIC HEALTH: Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety Office, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, for determining by experiment that microbes cling to bearded scientists.
CHEMISTRY: Eric Adams of MIT, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University, Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii, and BP [British Petroleum], for disproving the old belief that oil and water don’t mix.
MANAGEMENT: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.
BIOLOGY: Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats.