Each September, Improbable Research awards its Ig Nobel prizes to scientists who have carried out strange pieces of research.
The aim of the awards is to honor “achievements that first make people LAUGH, and then make them THINK,” according to Improbable Research. As Discovery reports, the 2015 Chemistry prize went to a joint project by U.S. and Australian researchers that cooked up a chemical recipe for partially un-boiling an egg.
Bizarre scientific research honored during Ig Nobel prize ceremony
Winners were announced Thursday night at an event at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater, with a number of fascinating projects walking away with honors.
Taiwanese and U.S. researchers who tested “the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds)” took home the Physics Ig Nobel Prize, while Gennaro Bernile, Vineet Bhagwat, and P. Raghavendra Rau won the Management Ig Nobel for their work which showed that a number of business leaders developed an increased appetite for risk after surviving natural disasters when they were children.
Police chiefs in the Thai capital of Bangkok were handed the Economics Ig Nobel for their offer to pay officers extra cash if they turned down bribes, and the Medicine Ig Nobel prize went to researchers from the United States, Europe and Asia who studied the effects of intense kissing and other physically intimate activities.
Mathematicians investigate tale of incredible fertility
The Ig Nobel prize for Mathematics was awarded to Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer, who attempted to work out if Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, would have been able to father 888 children between 1697 and 1727.
Those of you who yearn to see how dinosaurs walked the earth will be impressed by the Biology Ig Nobel prize award-winning project. Bruno Grossi, Omar Larach, Mauricio Canals, Rodrigo A. Vásquez, and José Iriarte-Díaz took home the prize for showing that chickens can be made to walk like dinosaurs by attaching a weighted stick to their rears.
Medical research received a huge boost thanks to the world of a number of scientists, who worked out that one way of diagnosing an acute appendicitis is to observe the amount of pain evident when the sufferer is driven over a set of speed bumps. Interesting stuff, and enough to take home the Diagnostic Medicine Ig Nobel.
