IG Nobel Prizes Honor Science of Ponytails And Coffee Spills
8:40AM Monday
September 24, 2012
September 24, 2012
The Ig Nobel prize ceremony, a parody of the Nobel prizes, happens at Harvard each year. Prizes are handed out by real Nobel laureates to the award winners who indulge in research that "first makes you laugh, then makes you think. Many of the winners are actual scientists.
Here is a look at the 2012 winners:
PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan and Tulio Guadalupe for their study "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller"
PEACE PRIZE: The SKN Company, for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.
ACOUSTICS PRIZE: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada 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, 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 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, and Raymond Goldstein, Patrick Warren, and Robin Ball, for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.
FLUID DYNAMICS PRIZE: Rouslan Krechetnikov and Hans Mayer 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 and Jennifer Pokorny for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.
MEDICINE PRIZE: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.
Here is a look back at the winners from 2011, as told by our Newsy Science friends on YouTube.
Learn more about the Ig Nobel prizes and nomination procedures by clicking HERE
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