Absurd Awards
Every year, Nobel laureates give out
awards to a select set of people whose research has made people laugh and then
think. Organised by the Annals of Improbable Research, a magazine devoted to
scientific humour, the parody event is called Ig Nobel Prizes (a pun on
ignoble). Here are some of this year’s awards:
MEDICINE
Marc Mitchell and David
Wartinger, for using roller coaster rides to try to hasten the passage
of kidney stones.
ANTHROPOLOGY
Tomas Persson, Gabriela-Alina
Sauciuc, and Elainie Madsen, for collecting
evidence, in a zoo, that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often, and about
as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees.
CHEMISTRY
Paula Romão, Adília Alarcão and the
late César Viana, for measuring the degree to which human saliva is
a good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces.
ECONOMICS
Lindie Hanyu Liang, Douglas
Brown, Huiwen Lian, Samuel Hanig, D. Lance Ferris, and Lisa
Keeping, for investigating whether it is effective for employees to
use Voodoo dolls to retaliate against abusive bosses.
PEACE PRIZE
Francisco Alonso, Cristina
Esteban, Andrea Serge, Maria-Luisa Ballestar, Jaime Sanmartín, Constanza
Calatayud, and Beatriz Alamar, for measuring the
frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an
automobile.
BIOLOGY
Paul Becher, Sebastien Lebreton,
Erika Wallin, Erik Hedenstrom, Felipe Borrero-Echeverry, Marie Bengtsson,
Volker Jorger, and Peter Witzgall, for demonstrating
that wine experts can reliably identify, by smell, the presence of a single fly
in a glass of wine.
ETM23SEP18
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