2012 Ig Nobel Awards

jbnbsn99

jbnbsn99

Well-Known Member
Yes indeed my friends, it is once again that time for the illustrious Ig Nobel Awards. These awards are for real science that first makes you laugh, then makes you think. With no further ado, here are the winners for 2012 (gratuitously copied and pasted from BBC).

Psychology Prize: Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan (Netherlands) and Tulio Guadalupe (Peru/Russia/Netherlands) for their study Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller.

Peace Prize: The SKN Company (Russia) for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.

Acoustics Prize: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada (Japan) for creating the SpeechJammer - a machine that disrupts a person's speech by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.

Neuroscience Prize: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford (US) for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere - even in a dead salmon.

Chemistry Prize: Johan Pettersson (Sweden/Rwanada) for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people's hair turned green.

Literature Prize: The US Government General Accountability Office for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.

Physics Prize: Joseph Keller (US), Raymond Goldstein (US/UK), Patrick Warren and Robin Ball (UK) for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail. Prof Keller was additionally given an Ig for work he contributed to on non-drip teapots in 1999 but for which he had been wrongly overlooked at the time.

Fluid Dynamics Prize: Rouslan Krechetnikov (US/Russia/Canada) and Hans Mayer (US) for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.

Anatomy Prize: Frans de Waal (Netherlands/US) and Jennifer Pokorny (US) for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.

Medicine Prize: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti (France) for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimise the chance that their patients will explode.
 
jbnbsn99 said:
Chemistry Prize: Johan Pettersson (Sweden/Rwanada) for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people's hair turned green.
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If my hair turned green I'd want someone to find out why!!! :D

Medicine Prize: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti (France) for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimise the chance that their patients will explode.
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Valuable research I think if patients have been exploding :eek:
 
jbnbsn99 said:
Neuroscience Prize: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford (US) for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere - even in a dead salmon.

Chemistry Prize: Johan Pettersson (Sweden/Rwanada) for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people's hair turned green.

Physics Prize: Joseph Keller (US), Raymond Goldstein (US/UK), Patrick Warren and Robin Ball (UK) for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail. Prof Keller was additionally given an Ig for work he contributed to on non-drip teapots in 1999 but for which he had been wrongly overlooked at the time.

Fluid Dynamics Prize: Rouslan Krechetnikov (US/Russia/Canada) and Hans Mayer (US) for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.

Medicine Prize: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti (France) for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimise the chance that their patients will explode.
Click to expand...

I thought Ig Nobel is something which deal with funny studies, but I see a real useful things. Maybe they are not so practically in everyday life today, but this studies are obviously not jokes, like a designing a solar-powered flashlight. By the way I've read 8 or 10 years ago about non-drip teapots, author/designer was a young woman (I doubt her name was Joseph).

Literature Prize is the best! :D
 
I actually work in the same research lab as Dr Patrick Warren - it's the first time my company has been awarded an IG Nobel and they seem very proud. To be fair to Patrick he does work in Hair Research or the Easy Part as my colleagues and I like to call it :D shh don't tell Patrick.

We had the IG Nobel tour in work as one of our 'lecture' series last year and they were bloody entertaining to be fair - the emergency Bra that doubled as respiratory protection was actually demonstrated on our head of lab - worth the attendance alone!!
 
It may not be an Ig Nobel that they won, but this is a surprisingly weird yet cool project. A group of my classmates at school won a $500 grant to look into making bioluminescent plants.
 
Congratulations to Frans de Waal for winning the anatomy Prize ! He did some remarkeble rechearch on the Chimp-colony at Burger's Zoo - the Netherlands and his book Chimpanzee Politics is realy good reading !
By the way, I also must have some chimpanzeeish in me because I also can identify surtain persons by seeing ( photos ) of their rear ends ;)
 
The Frans de Waal research on sexual attraction among chimpanzees does not seem foolish to me. Sexual behaviour among primates has much use to be able compare to sexual behaviour of the homo sapiens. Darwin himself wrote on this subject and remember how he was ridiculed in his day.
 
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