My top three Ig Nobel Prize winners 2008-2017 plus 1991
The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded to researchers that comply with one simple rule: their works have to “first make people laugh, and then make them think”. Each year only ten of these prestigious prizes are awarded, while thousands of applications are submitted. Surprisingly, or maybe not, each year around the 20 percent of nominations are self-nominations. It is fair to add that these researchers very seldom win the prize. In any way, the competition is certainly fierce. The Ig Nobels are awarded during the annual ceremony held at the Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. The prizes, handmade and with a design that varies each year, are physically handed out by actual Nobel prize winners, in front of a 1,200 people audience. There have been a few cases of people or institutions turning down the award. Before the announcement of the winners, the awarding committee silently contacts all researchers involved, to give them the option to decline this honour. However, most of them accept the Ig Nobel and also travel all the way to Harvard, obviously at their own expenses. The prize, in fact, does not include any monetary amount, with the exception of the year 2013, when each of the ten winners was given a 10,000,000,000,000 (ten trillion) dollar bill from Zimbabwe.
Besides their playful intent, the Ig Nobels have also a much more serious aim: to honour good achievements that are also odd, funny, or even absurd. In his book La pazza scienza [the crazy science], the young astrophysicist Luca Perri explains how research should not be fostered by the desire of making the world a better place but simply by curiosity. This is exactly what the Ig Nobel awards are there for. They recognize the value and the pleasure of exploration and they reward researchers who tackle questions answering which may seem purposeless but can turn out to have fundamental implications. As in the case of the research on a mould that was able to escape a labyrinth. It was found out that its ramifications were similar to those of tumour vascularisations, the system of blood vessels cancer uses to propagate. The research was used to create a computer model that could help to defeat the disease. Ig Nobel winners also studied the oscillations of pony tales, discovering that they are balanced by the same relations as the interactions between the Earth and the Moon. Also, winning research demonstrated that DNA packaging is predictable using the same equations that regulate the breaking points of spaghetti.
The conclusion is that science does not need to have a purpose to be worth it. On the contrary, it is exactly the research undertaken with no special intent but out of mere curiosity that has the ability to surprise you. Below, I listed my personal three favourite Ig Nobel winning researches for each of the last ten years, plus for 1991, the first year they have been awarded. While having fun, I invite you to try and think about one potential serious application of each discovery. I bet you will agree with my (and doctor Perri’s) thesis.
The 2017 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
PEACE PRIZE [Switzerland, Canada, The Netherlands, USA]
To Milo Puhan and colleagues for demonstrating that regular playing of a didgeridoo, a musical instrument, is an effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea, also known as snoring.
COGNITION PRIZE [Italy, Spain, UK]
To Matteo Martini and colleagues for demonstrating that many identical twins cannot tell themselves apart visually. When twins are presented with a picture they cannot establish if it is a portrait of themselves or their sibling.
OBSTETRICS PRIZE [Spain]
To Marisa López-Teijón and colleagues for showing that a developing human foetus responds more strongly to music that is played electromechanically inside the mother’s vagina than to music that is played electromechanically on the mother’s belly. As an outcome of their research, they designed and offer a product named “Babypod“.
The 2016 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
CHEMISTRY PRIZE [Germany]
Awarded to Volkswagen, for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested.
LITERATURE PRIZE [Sweden]
To Fredrik Sjöberg, for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead.
MEDICINE PRIZE [Germany]
To Christoph Helmchen and colleagues for discovering that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body (and vice versa).
The 2015 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
ECONOMICS PRIZE [Thailand]
To the Bangkok Metropolitan Police, for offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refused to take bribes. References were found in numerous news reports.
MATHEMATICS PRIZE [Austria, Germany, UK, Austria, Germany]
To Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer for trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children.
PHYSIOLOGY AND ENTOMOLOGY PRIZE [USA, Canada, Panama, UK, The Netherlands]
Awarded jointly to two individuals: Justin Schmidt for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects; and to Michael L. Smith for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are the least painful (the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm) and which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft).
The 2014 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
ECONOMICS PRIZE [Italy]
To the ISTAT (Italian government’s National Institute of Statistics) for proudly taking the lead in fulfilling the European Union mandate for each country to increase the official size of its national economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling, and all other unlawful financial transactions between willing participants.
BIOLOGY PRIZE [Czech Republic, Germany, Zambia]
To Vlastimil Hart and colleagues for carefully documenting that when dogs defecate and urinate, they prefer to align their body axis with Earth’s north-south geomagnetic field lines.
ARCTIC SCIENCE PRIZE [Norway, Germany, USA, Canada]
To Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl for testing how reindeer react to seeing humans who are disguised as polar bears.
The 2013 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
PEACE PRIZE [Belarus]
Jointly awarded to Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, and to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.
SAFETY ENGINEERING PRIZE [USA]
To the late Gustano Pizzo for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap aeroplane hijackers. The system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the aeroplane’s specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival. US Patent #3811643, Gustano A. Pizzo, “anti-hijacking system for aircraft”, May 21, 1972.
PROBABILITY PRIZE [The Netherlands, UK, Canada],
Bert Tolkamp and others for making two related discoveries: first, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again.
The 2012 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
LITERATURE PRIZE [USA]
To 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. The title of the report was “Actions Needed to Evaluate the Impact of Efforts to Estimate Costs of Reports and Studies”.
MEDICINE PRIZE [France]
To Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode. Even though more rarely than in the past, subjects of colonoscopies do seldom explode still nowadays.
ACOUSTICS PRIZE [Japan]
Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada for creating the Speech-Jammer, a machine that disrupts a person’s speech by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay. It is currently possible to acquire an App based on it on the Apple Store.
The 2011 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
MATHEMATICS PRIZE [USA, Korea, Uganda]
To Dorothy Martin (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011) for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.
PEACE PRIZE [Lithuania]
To Arturas Zuokas, mayor of Vilnius, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armoured tank.
MEDICINE PRIZE [The Netherlands, UK, Belgium, USA, Australia]
Mirjam Tuk and others for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things but worse decisions about other kinds of things‚ when they have a strong urge to urinate.
The 2010 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
ECONOMICS PRIZE [USA]
To the executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.
MANAGEMENT PRIZE [Italy]
To Alessandro Pluchino and colleagues for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.
PEACE PRIZE [UK]
Richard Stephens and colleagues for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.
The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
LITERATURE PRIZE [Ireland]
To Ireland’s police service (An Garda Siochana) for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country – Prawo Jazdy – whose name in Polish means “Driving License”.
CHEMISTRY PRIZE [Mexico]
To Javier Morales and colleagues for creating diamonds from a liquid, specifically from tequila.
MEDICINE PRIZE [USA]
To Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand every day for more than sixty (60) years.
The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
PEACE PRIZE [Switzerland]
To the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.
MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, Singapore]
To Dan Ariely and others (from Duke University, MIT, Stanford University and INSEAD) for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine.
ECONOMICS PRIZE [USA]
Geoffrey Miller and colleagues for discovering that professional lap dancers earn higher tips when they are ovulating.
The very first Ig Nobel Prize Winners
PEACE [Hungary]
To Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and first champion of the Star Wars weapons system, for his lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it.
ECONOMICS [USA]
To Michael Milken, a titan of Wall Street and father of the junk bond, to whom the world is indebted.
LITERATURE [Switzerland]
To Erich von Daniken, visionary raconteur and author of Chariots of the Gods for explaining how human civilization was influenced by ancient astronauts from outer space. Probably inspired by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the religion of Scientology, who in 1950 wrote his bestselling book Dianetics in which a similar scenario was depicted.
Perpetual Root 
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