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12:20 pm, October 13th, 2007 - 1 comment
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This years’ Ig Nobel awards have just been presented.
The awards recognise achievements that “first make people laugh, then make them think”.
Pictured is Ig Nobel Medicine Prize winner Dan Meyer punctuating his and Brian Witcombe’s joint one-minute-long acceptance speech for their prize in the medicine category. Their paper was entitled: “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects.”
Other notable winners included:
PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Galles, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
The full list of awards is here.
The Scientific American podcast just covered this. The event organiser was pretty funny. Extremely dry and sarcastic. Brilliant. They had a guy on stage eating soup throughout the event. It was a reference to an interesting study into human greed. The experiment that won the award tested volunteers eating soup. Unbeknownest to the volunteers, the soup bowl was being surreptiously filled from underneath the table. It was a true bottomless bowl of soup. The experiment found that almost all people continued to eat the soup way past their comfort zone. Most had to actually be told to stop spooning soup into their mouths. Of the two people who actually stopped on their own volition: One discovered the pumping technology under the table and cottoned on to the wheeze and the other had some sort of issue that meant he/she stopped early. For the rest of them, they were happy to consume soup until they popped!