So much scientific research never gets the attention it needs to be appreciated ¡ for how laughably odd it is.?That¡¯s where the Ig Nobel Prizes come in.
Last night at MIT, some of the most brilliant people in the world subjected themselves to the 34th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, organized by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine in collaboration with the MIT Press ().
Ten particularly gobsmacking academic papers were ¡°honored.¡± Host Marc Abrahams noted that every Ig Nobel Prize winner ¡°has done something that first makes people laugh and then makes them think.¡± No matter how high you are, this ceremony could not seem more weird. Each winner received 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars. Hundreds of paper airplanes were thrown. Someone dressed up as a cow. Yes, of course, there was accordion music.
B.F. Skinner¡¯s octogenarian daughter Julie Skinner Vargas was on hand to accept the Peace Prize for a paper her father published in 1960 about ¡°the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide their flight paths.¡±?
Wearing a white baseball cap, Vargas said, ¡°On behalf of my father, B.F. Skinner, I want to thank you for finally acknowledging his most important contribution.¡± She lamented that most people only know him for his research on operant conditioning and his best-selling book ¡°Walden Two.¡±?
¡°Even the B.F. Skinner Foundation fails to put a missile on its hat,¡± Vargas said. ¡°So thank you for finally putting the record straight.¡± Then she threw her baseball cap into the audience and walked offstage.?
Here are descriptions of a few other winners, lightly edited for space and clarity:
- Botany: Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding evidence that some plants imitate the shapes of neighboring plastic plants.
- Anatomy: Marjolaine Willems et al, for studying whether hair on people in the northern hemisphere swirls in the same direction as hair on people in the southern hemisphere.
- Physics: James C. Liao, for explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.
- Physiology: Ryo Okabe et al, for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus. (Not news in Washington.)
- Demography: Saul Justin Newman, for discovering that people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping.
- Biology: Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen, for exploding a paper bag next to a cat standing on the back of a cow, to explore how and when cows spew their milk.
An edited recording of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will be broadcast on public radio¡¯s ¡°Science Friday¡± on Nov. 29.
