Harvard University has awarded its 23rd annual batch of Ig Nobel Prizes at a farcical ceremony held in its Sanders Theatre.
Each Ig Nobel distinction comes together with a hammer and 10 trillion toy dollars. This year’s winners include Chinese and Japanese scientists who studied the impact of opera on post-heart-transplant mice, Scottish scientists who assessed probabilities of a grazing cow lying down or standing up, international scientists who discovered astronavigation in dung beetles, American scientists who found out which parts of a shrew cannot be digested by humans, a Russian scientist, named Yuri Ivanenko, who proved that the presence of water would help astronauts walk on the Moon, and, rather unexpectedly, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who outlawed public applause. This story dates from 2011, when Belarusian pro-democracy activists loudly clapped hands in the streets to protest against some of his controversial policies. Ridiculously, the people detained for clapping hands included Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet, who has only one hand. Alexander Lukashenko was the only Ig Nobel winner who did not turn up for this year’s award ceremony. Although ridiculous, Ig Nobel prizes sometimes turn out to be excellent predictors of scientific breakthroughs. Many years ago, Russian-born physicists Drs Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov won Ig Nobels for studying the behavior of frozen frogs in magnetic fields and for scrutinizing marks left by cylindrical graphite rods rolled against sticky tape. In 2010, these guys won the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering graphene, a monomolecular carbon film promising breakthroughs in microelectronic technology. Source: Article
