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Outside In | How China’s Belt and Road Initiative could benefit from Ig Nobel Prize-winning research
- Honouring research that makes one laugh and think, this year’s Ig Nobel winners range from analysis of cat-human communication to a paper on discarded chewing gum
- A study that found the obesity of a country’s politicians is a good indicator of corruption in that country probably has the most practical value
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As world leaders gathered this week at the UN General Assembly in New York, I wonder how many recall that nine of them were winners last year of the Ig Nobel Prize for Medical Education “for using the Covid-19 pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists or doctors”?
They included British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and former US president Donald Trump. Unfortunately, they were not Ig Nobel winners again this year, for having a medium- to long-term effect on life and death.
Perhaps that is because the Ig Nobel Prizes, published annually in the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research, are intended “first to make you laugh, and then to make you think”. There is little in their Covid-19 legacy that we can laugh about.
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Nevertheless, this year’s prizes were full of hilarity, and reminders that the route to knowledge is often a circuitous and serendipitous one.
Among them was a biology prize for cat-human communication, and a chemistry prize for analysis of the air inside cinemas to see how the odours produced reflect the levels of violence, sex and bad language in the film being screened.
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