from the and-that-is-scientific-research dept.
Winners of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes, celebrating unusual scientific research, have been announced. Some highlights of prizes awarded to thought-provoking research this year include:
Inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg
Bangkok Metropolitan Police offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes
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
Although perhaps the most deserved win goes to a pair of Smiths for...
...Justin Schmidt 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).
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Think of the Nobel prizes and you think of groundbreaking research bettering mankind, but the awards have also honoured some quite unhumanitarian inventions such as chemical weapons, DDT and lobotomies.
Numerous Nobel prize controversies have erupted over the years: authors who were overlooked, scientists who claimed their discovery came first, or peace prizes that divided public opinion.
But some of the science prizes appear in hindsight to be embarrassing choices by the committees.
When the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize went to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, it was perhaps a way of making up for the Nobel "war prize" it awarded to German chemist Fritz Haber in 1918.
Haber was honoured with the chemistry prize for his work on the synthesis of ammonia, which was crucial for developing fertilizers for food production.
But Haber, known as the "father of chemical warfare", also developed poisonous gases used in trench warfare in World War I at the Battle of Ypres which he supervised himself.
Alfred Nobel himself invented dynamite, so perhaps such things are woven into the DNA of the prize.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 19 2015, @11:21AM
Huh?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 19 2015, @01:36PM
Ehhh - I think it's kinda cool. Off the wall stuff that just needs to be done, and documented. How many things are there that "Well, everyone knows . . ." but when someone puts it to the test, it ain't so.
(Score: 3, Informative) by eof on Saturday September 19 2015, @03:45PM
I think AC was referring to one of the winners of an Ig Nobel this year. The paper "Is 'Huh?' a universal word? Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items" [plos.org] won the Literature Prize "for discovering that the word "huh?" (or its equivalent) seems to exist in every human language — and for not being quite sure why."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 19 2015, @06:38PM
Is 'Huh?' a universal word?
A-yup.
'Huh' in hieroglyphs. [wikipedia.org]
:)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 19 2015, @03:39PM
A study showing that nearly all mammals take the same amount of time to urinate has been awarded one of the 2015 Ig Nobel prizes at Harvard University. Using high-speed video analysis, they modelled the fluid dynamics involved in urination and discovered that all mammals weighing more than 3kg empty their bladders over about 21 seconds. Their subjects included rats, goats, cows and elephants - and although the findings reveal a remarkably consistent "scaling law" in bigger beasts, they also emphasise that small animals do things quite differently.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34278595 [bbc.com]
Submitter comment: I don't know about you, but during my beer drinking days I could sustain a good 3 minute pee.
Original Submission [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by tibman on Saturday September 19 2015, @06:06PM
We will not speak of the study involving drunk rats, nor the one of drunk goats, and never ever about the drunk elephants *shudders*.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Saturday September 19 2015, @10:49PM
>Inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg
There's nothing wrong with that, it's perfectly legitimate chemistry, plus it has immediate practical applications (such as for people who like raw or partially raw egg but not salmonella, etc.)
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(Score: 2) by bugamn on Sunday September 20 2015, @05:31AM
But it is funny nonetheless.