Weird science: Ig Nobel Prize ceremony 2015 highlights
Mammal urination duration, chickens that walk like dinosaurs and how to unboil an egg are among the prize winning studies
This year’s prize is a potted plant and a bogus 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, but each September for 25 years, scientists from around the world have flocked to Harvard University to collect their Ig Nobel Prizes – which honour and mock them in equal measure.
This year, researchers from Taiwan and the US were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in physics for testing the principal that mammals – big and small – take the same length of time to urinate.
The economics prize was a send-up, however, and went to the Bangkok Metropolitan Police, for offering to pay officers extra cash if they refused to take a bribe.
The awards mimic the Nobel Prizes, but with noble intent. They were conceived to celebrate unusual academic achievements that make people laugh, and then think.
They are handed out at a gala ceremony at Harvard University in the US, by genuine Nobel laureates. The ceremony is produced by science-humour magazine the Annals of Improbable Research, and co-sponsored by the Harvard Radcliffe Society of Physics Students and the Harvard Radcliffe Science Fiction Association. They are intended to encourage an earnest interest in science, medicine and technology.