What makes a discovery outstanding and memorable? Improbable Research said it should be laughable but would eventually make a person think and ponder on the wonders of science. This is the theme of this year’s Ig Nobel awards, participated by students from different universities in the world.
The winner of 2015 Chemistry prize is a team of young scientists from the U.S. and Australia for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg. It may sound ridiculous at first but there actually is a basis for it. The participants are required to submit a hypothesis followed by an actual demonstration.
In fact, journal Nature confirmed that behind the less conventional and silly-sounding experiments, there have been actual research that validates the participants’ methods and the results.
This annual event, founded by Marc Abrahams in 1991, is held at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater every September. All entries are eligible to win in any of the 10 award categories namely Chemistry, Physics, Literature, Management, Economics, Medicine, Mathematics, Biology, Diagnostic Medicine, and Physiology and Entomology.
The other winning entries for each category are as follows: Physics, all biological mammals can empty their bladder in just 21 seconds; Literature, for the word “huh?” is universal and all words contain it; Economics, for offering to pay policemen extra cash if they refuse to take bribes; and Management, for discovering that many business leaders are fond of taking risks especially natural disasters.
Raghu Rau, professor of finance at the University of Cambridge who won the Management prize, took Steve Jobs and Tim Cook as examples. According to him, Jobs who lived on a deadly landslide near home was conservative in running Apple, while Cook who witnessed few disasters in life is more risky in business decisions.
For the medicine prize, a group who experimented the biomedical benefits or consequences of intense kissing won the recognition; Mathematics, for determining how Moulay Ismael, a Moroccan emperor, managed to father 888 children in just 30 years; and Biology, for demonstrating that attaching a stick at a rear end of the chicken would make them walk like a dinosaur.
For Diagnostic Medicine, the group who determined that acute appendicitis can be diagnosed by the amount of pain apparent when a person is driven over speed bumps won; and Physiology and Entomology, for repeatedly subjecting to stings of 25 bees to identify which body area is the most painful.
The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for 10 unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. The stated aim of the prizes is to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think”.