Flying frogs, flirtitious ostriches and dogs-to-human translation devices

Inspired by the recent IgNobel award ceremony, I prepared a list of the 17 most interesting prizes given since 1991, when this institution was initiated.

According to the organisers: "The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."

The Ig Nobels are a tribute to scientists who have dedicated their time in answering "smaller" scientific questions or are highlighting absurd discoveries that natural world throws up to them. The 10 prizes, the categories differ from year to year, are not only given to scientists but they are also a type of criticism of what is happening around us. The Ig Nobels are not funny, it is the combination of the work of the winners with the type of the prize that they are awarded and the justification given that can make one laugh.

So, here is my list (in a random order):

Management prize, 2010: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.

Linguistics prize, 2007: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

Physics, 2003: Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia, for their irresistible report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces."

Biology, 2003: Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden's National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting.

Biology, 2002: N. Bubier, Charles G.M. Paxton, Phil Bowers, and D. Charles Deeming of the United Kingdom, for their report "Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain."

Economics, 2001: Joel Slemrod, of the University of Michigan Business School, and Wojciech Kopczuk, of University of British Columbia [and who has since moved to Columbia University], for their conclusion that people find a way to postpone their deaths if that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax.

Technology, 2001: Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent Office for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012.

Psychology, 2000: David Dunning of Cornell University and Justin Kruger of the University of Illinois, for their modest report, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments."

Physics, 2000: Andre Geim of the University of Nijmegen, Netherlands, and Sir Michael Berry of Bristol University, UK, for using magnets to levitate a frog.

Andre Geim won also a Nobel Prize in Physics, in 2010, for his work on graphene. On his Nobel Prize lecture he said about the frog experiment: "...With this idea in mind and, allegedly, on a Friday night, I poured water inside the lab’s electromagnet when it was at its maximum power. Pouring water in one's equipment is certainly not a standard scientific approach, and I cannot recall why I behaved so ‘unprofessionally’. Apparently, no one had tried such a silly thing before, although similar facilities existed in several places around the world for decades. To my surprise, water did not end up on the floor but got stuck in the vertical bore of the magnet...As a result, we saw balls of levitating water. This was awesome. It took little time to realise that the physics behind was good old diamagnetism..Out of the many objects that we had floating inside the magnet, it was the image of a levitating frog  that started the media hype".

Flying frog

Chemistry, 2000: Donatella Marazziti, Alessandra Rossi, and Giovanni B. Cassano of the University of Pisa, and Hagop S. Akiskal of the University of California, for their discovery that, biochemically, romantic love may be indistinguishable from having severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Statistics, 1998: Jerald Bain of Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto and Kerry Siminoski of the University of Alberta for their carefully measured report, "The Relationship Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size."

Nutrition, 1995: John Martinez of J. Martinez & Company in Atlanta, Georgia, for Luak Coffee, the world's most expensive coffee, which is made from coffee beans ingested and excreted by the luak (aka, the palm civet), a bobcat-like animal native to Indonesia. 

Medicine, 1994: This prize was awarded in two parts. First, to Patient X, formerly of the US Marine Corps, valiant victim of a venomous bite from his pet rattlesnake, for his determined use of electroshock therapy -- at his own insistence, automobile sparkplug wires were attached to his lip, and the car engine revved to 3000 rpm for five minutes. Second, to Dr. Richard C. Dart of the Rocky Mountain Poison Center and Dr. Richard A. Gustafson of The University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, for their well-grounded medical report: "Failure of Electric Shock Treatment for Rattlesnake Envenomation."

Psychology, 1993: John Mack of Harvard Medical School and David Jacobs of Temple University, mental visionaries, for their leaping conclusion that people who believe they were kidnapped by aliens from outer space, probably were — and especially for their conclusion "the focus of the abduction is the production of children.

Visionary Technology, 1993: Presented jointly to Jay Schiffman of Farmington Hills, Michigan, crack inventor of AutoVision, an image projection device that makes it possible to drive a car and watch television at the same time, and to the Michigan state legislature, for making it legal to do so.

Economics, 1992: The investors of Lloyds of London, heirs to 300 years of dull prudent management, for their bold attempt to insure disaster by refusing to pay for their company's losses.

Literature, 1992: Yuri Struchkov, unstoppable author from the Institute of Organoelemental Compounds in Moscow, for the 948 scientific papers he published between the years 1981 and 1990, averaging more than one every 3.9 days. 

So, cheers to the winners and to all the scientists that are not afraid to use their imagination and make absurd discoveries!!

The winners of the Peace IgNobel Prizes deserve to be mentioned separately. I am posting them exactly as they were described by the IgNobel committee.

2011: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.

REFERENCE: VIDEO and OFFICIAL CITY INFO

2009: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.

2008. The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.

2005: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie "Star Wars."

2004: Daisuke Inoue of Hyogo, Japan, for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.

2003: Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; Second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and Third, for creating the Association of Dead People.

Lal Bihari overcame the handicap of being dead, and managed to obtain a passport from the Indian government so that he could travel to Harvard to accept his Prize. However, the U.S. government refused to allow him into the country. His friend Madhu Kapoor therefore came to the Ig Nobel Ceremony and accepted the Prize on behalf of Lal Bihari. Several weeks later, the Prize was presented to Lal Bihari himself in a special ceremony in India.

2002: Keita Sato, President of Takara Co., Dr. Matsumi Suzuki, President of Japan Acoustic Lab, and Dr. Norio Kogure, Executive Director, Kogure Veterinary Hospital, for promoting peace and harmony between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual, a computer-based automatic dog-to-human language translation device. 

2000: Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong of Johannesburg, South Africa, for inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower. (Patent WO/1999/032331, "A Security System for a Vehicle") 

1999: The British Royal Navy, for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout "Bang!"

1994: John Hagelin of Maharishi University and The Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, promulgator of peaceful thoughts, for his experimental conclusion that 4,000 trained meditators caused an 18 percent decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C.

1993: The Pepsi-Cola Company of the Phillipines, suppliers of sugary hopes and dreams, for sponsoring a contest to create a millionaire, and then announcing the wrong winning number, thereby inciting and uniting 800,000 riotously expectant winners, and bringing many warring factions together for the first time in their nation's history.

1992 : Daryl Gates, former Police Chief of the City of Los Angeles, for his uniquely compelling methods of bringing people together in the LA riots.