the ig nobel prizes

The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think." Organized by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they are presented by a group that includes genuine Nobel Laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University's Sanders Theater.
The first Ig Nobels were awarded in 1991, at that time for discoveries "that cannot, or should not, be reproduced." Ten prizes are awarded each year in many categories, including the Nobel Prize categories of physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, literature, and peace, but also other categories such as public health, engineering, biology, and interdisciplinary research. The name is a play on the word ignoble.

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 2, at the 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

NUTRITION PRIZE. Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.


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


ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE. Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.


BIOLOGY PRIZE. Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.


MEDICINE PRIZE. Dan Ariely of Duke University (USA), Rebecca L. Waber of MIT (USA), Baba Shiv of Stanford University (USA), and Ziv Carmon of INSEAD (Singapore) for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine..


COGNITIVE SCIENCE PRIZE. Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University, Japan, Hiroyasu Yamada of Nagoya, Japan, Ryo Kobayashi of Hiroshima University, Atsushi Tero of Presto JST, Akio Ishiguro of Tohoku University, and Ágotá Tóth of the University of Szeged, Hungary, for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles.


ECONOMICS PRIZE. Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that professional lap dancers earn higher tips when they are ovulating.


PHYSICS PRIZE. Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.


CHEMISTRY PRIZE. Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and to Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not.


LITERATURE PRIZE. David Sims of Cass Business School. London, UK, for his lovingly written study "You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations."



The 2007 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 4, at the 17th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."


PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.


BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.


CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.


LINGUISTICS: 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.

LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.


PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.


NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.


ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.


AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.


The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize winners were awarded on Thursday night, October 5, at the 16th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

ORNITHOLOGY: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.


NUTRITION: Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.


PEACE: Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant -- a device that makes annoying high-pitched noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults; and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but probably not to their teachers.

ACOUSTICS: D. Lynn Halpern (of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, and Brandeis University, and Northwestern University), Randolph Blake (of Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University) and James Hillenbrand (of Western Michigan University and Northwestern University) for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.


MATHEMATICS: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed


LITERATURE: Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University for his report "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly."


MEDICINE: Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage"; and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, for their subsequent medical case report also titled "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage."

PHYSICS: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces.


CHEMISTRY: Antonio Mulet, José Javier Benedito and José Bon of the University of Valencia, Spain, and Carmen Rosselló of the University of Illes Balears, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, for their study "Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature."


BIOLOGY: Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Centre, Tanzania, and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna Austria) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.

The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

The 2005 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday evening, October 6, at the 15th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

AGRICULTURAL HISTORY: James Watson of Massey University, New Zealand, for his scholarly study, "The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley’s Exploding Trousers."

PHYSICS: John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 -- in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.

MEDICINE: Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing Neuticles -- artificial replacement testicles for dogs, which are available in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness.


LITERATURE: The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters -- General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others -- each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.

PEACE: 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."


ECONOMICS: Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.


CHEMISTRY: Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin, for conducting a careful experiment to settle the longstanding scientific question: can people swim faster in syrup or in water?


BIOLOGY: Benjamin Smith of the University of Adelaide, Australia and the University of Toronto, Canada and the Firmenich perfume company, Geneva, Switzerland, and ChemComm Enterprises, Archamps, France; Craig Williams of James Cook University and the University of South Australia; Michael Tyler of the University of Adelaide; Brian Williams of the University of Adelaide; and Yoji Hayasaka of the Australian Wine Research Institute; for painstakingly smelling and cataloging the peculiar odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed.


NUTRITION: Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats of Tokyo, Japan, for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (and counting).


FLUID DYNAMICS: Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu, Finland; and Jozsef Gal of Loránd Eötvös University, Hungary, for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report "Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation."



The 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

The 2004 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday evening, September 30, at the 14th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

MEDICINE
Steven Stack of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA and James Gundlach of Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA, for their published report "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide."


PHYSICS
Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottawa, and Michael Turvey of the University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratory, for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping.


PUBLIC HEALTH
Jillian Clarke of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, and then Howard University, for investigating the scientific validity of the Five-Second Rule about whether it's safe to eat food that's been dropped on the floor.


CHEMISTRY
The Coca-Cola Company of Great Britain, for using advanced technology to convert ordinary tap water into Dasani, a transparent form of water, which for precautionary reasons has been made unavailable to consumers.

ENGINEERING
Donald J. Smith and his father, the late Frank J. Smith, of Orlando Florida, USA, for patenting the combover (U.S. Patent #4,022,227).


LITERATURE
The American Nudist Research Library of Kissimmee, Florida, USA, for preserving nudist history so that everyone can see it.


PSYCHOLOGY
Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else -- even a woman in a gorilla suit.


ECONOMICS
The Vatican, for outsourcing prayers to India.

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


BIOLOGY
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.


The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize winners were announced on Thursday evening, October 2, at the 13th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

ENGINEERING
The late John Paul Stapp, the late Edward A. Murphy, Jr., and George Nichols, for jointly giving birth in 1949 to Murphy's Law, the basic engineering principle that "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do it" (or, in other words: "If anything can go wrong, it will").


PHYSICS
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."


MEDICINE
Eleanor Maguire, David Gadian, Ingrid Johnsrude, Catriona Good, John Ashburner, Richard Frackowiak, and Christopher Frith of University College London, for presenting evidence that the brains of London taxi drivers are more highly developed than those of their fellow citizens.


PSYCHOLOGY
Gian Vittorio Caprara and Claudio Barbaranelli of the University of Rome, and Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University, for their discerning report "Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities."


CHEMISTRY
Yukio Hirose of Kanazawa University, for his chemical investigation of a bronze statue, in the city of Kanazawa, that fails to attract pigeons.


LITERATURE
John Trinkaus, of the Zicklin School of Business, New York City, for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him
(such as: What percentage of young people wear baseball caps with the peak facing to the rear rather than to the front; What percentage of pedestrians wear sport shoes that are white rather than some other color; What percentage of swimmers swim laps in the shallow end of a pool rather than the deep end; What percentage of automobile drivers almost, but not completely, come to a stop at one particular stop-sign; What percentage of commuters carry attaché cases; What percentage of shoppers exceed the number of items permitted in a supermarket's express checkout lane; and What percentage of students dislike the taste of Brussels sprouts.)


ECONOMICS
Karl Schwärzler and the nation of Liechtenstein, for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings.


INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson, and Magnus Enquist of Stockholm University, for their inevitable report "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans."


PEACE
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.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: 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. [NOTE: Filmmaker Satish Kaushik will be making a film about the life (and death and life) of Lal Bihari.]

BIOLOGY
C.W. Moeliker, of Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.


The 2002 Ig Nobel Prize Winners



BIOLOGY
Norma E. 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."
PHYSICS
Arnd Leike of the University of Munich, for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay.

INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
Karl Kruszelnicki of The University of Sydney, for performing a comprehensive survey of human belly button lint -- who gets it, when, what color, and how much.

CHEMISTRY
Theodore Gray of Wolfram Research, in Champaign, Illinois, for gathering many elements of the periodic table, and assembling them into the form of a four-legged periodic table table.

MATHEMATICS
K.P. Sreekumar and the late G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University, India, for their analytical report "Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants."

LITERATURE
Vicki Silvers Gier and David S. Kreiner of Central Missouri State University, for their colorful report "The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension." [

PEACE
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.

HYGIENE
Eduardo Segura, of Lavakan de Aste, in Tarragona, Spain, for inventing a washing machine for cats and dogs.

ECONOMICS
The executives, corporate directors, and auditors of Enron, Lernaut & Hauspie [Belgium], Adelphia, Bank of Commerce and Credit International [Pakistan], Cendant, CMS Energy, Duke Energy, Dynegy, Gazprom [Russia], Global Crossing, HIH Insurance [Australia], Informix, Kmart, Maxwell Communications [UK], McKessonHBOC, Merrill Lynch, Merck, Peregrine Systems, Qwest Communications, Reliant Resources, Rent-Way, Rite Aid, Sunbeam, Tyco, Waste Management, WorldCom, Xerox, and Arthur Andersen, for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world. [NOTE: all companies are U.S.-based unless otherwise noted.]

MEDICINE
Chris McManus of University College London, for his excruciatingly balanced report, "Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture."

The 2001 Ig Nobel Prize Winners


MEDICINE
Peter Barss of McGill University, for his impactful medical report "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts."

PHYSICS
David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts for his partial solution to the question of why shower curtains billow inwards.

BIOLOGY
Buck Weimer of Pueblo, Colorado for inventing Under-Ease, airtight underwear with a replaceable charcoal filter that removes bad-smelling gases before they escape.

ECONOMICS
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 that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax.

LITERATURE
John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural and possessive.

PSYCHOLOGY
Lawrence W. Sherman of Miami University, Ohio, for his influential research report "An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children."

ASTROPHYSICS
Dr. Jack and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell.

PEACE
Viliumas Malinauskus of Grutas, Lithuania, for creating the amusement park known as "Stalin World."

TECHNOLOGY
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.

PUBLIC HEALTH
Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, for their probing medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among adolescents.

The 2000 Ig Nobel Prize Winners



PSYCHOLOGY
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."

LITERATURE
Jasmuheen (formerly known as Ellen Greve) of Australia, first lady of Breatharianism, for her book "Living on Light," which explains that although some people do eat food, they don't ever really need to.

BIOLOGY
Richard Wassersug of Dalhousie University, for his first-hand report, "On the Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica."

PHYSICS
Andre Geim of the University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands) and Sir Michael Berry of Bristol University (UK), for using magnets to levitate a frog.

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

ECONOMICS
The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, for bringing efficiency and steady growth to the mass-marriage industry, with, according to his reports, a 36-couple wedding in 1960, a 430-couple wedding in 1968, an 1800-couple wedding in 1975, a 6000-couple wedding in 1982, a 30,000-couple wedding in 1992, a 360,000-couple wedding in 1995, and a 36,000,000-couple wedding in 1997.

MEDICINE
Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Pek van Andel, and Eduard Mooyaart of Groningen, The Netherlands, and Ida Sabelis of Amsterdam, for their illuminating report, "Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal."
COMPUTER SCIENCE
Chris Niswander of Tucson, Arizona, for inventing PawSense, software that detects when a cat is walking across your computer keyboard.

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

PUBLIC HEALTH
Jonathan Wyatt, Gordon McNaughton, and William Tullet of Glasgow, for their alarming report, "The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow."

The 1999 Ig Nobel Prize Winners



SOCIOLOGY
Steve Penfold, of York University in Toronto, for doing his PhD thesis on the sociology of Canadian donut shops.

PHYSICS
Dr. Len Fisher of Bath, England and Sydney, Australia for calculating the optimal way to dunk a biscuit.
...and...
Professor Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck of the University of East Anglia, England, and Belgium, for calculating how to make a teapot spout that does not drip.

LITERATURE
The British Standards Institution for its six-page specification (BS-6008) of the proper way to make a cup of tea.

SCIENCE EDUCATION
The Kansas State Board of Education and the Colorado State Board of Education, for mandating that children should not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution any more than they believe in Newton's theory of gravitation, Faraday's and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, or Pasteur's theory that germs cause disease.

MEDICINE
Dr. Arvid Vatle of Stord, Norway, for carefully collecting, classifying, and contemplating which kinds of containers his patients chose when
submitting urine samples.

CHEMISTRY
Takeshi Makino, president of The Safety Detective Agency in Osaka, Japan, for his involvement with S-Check, an infidelity detection spray that wives can apply to their husbands' underwear.

BIOLOGY
Dr. Paul Bosland, director of The Chile Pepper Institute, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, for breeding a spiceless jalapeno chile pepper.

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
Hyuk-ho Kwon of Kolon Company of Seoul, Korea, for inventing the self-perfuming business suit.

PEACE
Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong of Johannesburg, South Africa, for inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower.

MANAGED HEALTH CARE
The late George and Charlotte Blonsky of New York City and San Jose, California, for inventing a device (US Patent #3,216,423) to aid women in giving birth -- the woman is strapped onto a circular table, and the table is then rotated at high speed.

The 1998 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

SAFETY ENGINEERING
Troy Hurtubise, of North Bay, Ontario, for developing, and personally testing a suit of armor that is impervious to grizzly bears.

BIOLOGY
Peter Fong of Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for contributing to the happiness of clams by giving them Prozac.

PEACE
Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan, for their aggressively peaceful explosions of atomic bombs.

CHEMISTRY
Jacques Benveniste of France, for his homeopathic discovery that not only does water have memory, but that the information can be transmitted over telephone lines and the Internet.


SCIENCE EDUCATION
Dolores Krieger, Professor Emerita, New York University, for demonstrating the merits of therapeutic touch, a method by which nurses manipulate the energy fields of ailing patients by carefully avoiding physical contact with those patients.

STATISTICS
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."


PHYSICS. Deepak Chopra of The Chopra Center for Well Being, La Jolla, California, for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.


ECONOMICS. Richard Seed of Chicago for his efforts to stoke up the world economy by cloning himself and other human beings.

MEDICINE
To Patient Y and to his doctors, Caroline Mills, Meirion Llewelyn, David Kelly, and Peter Holt, of Royal Gwent Hospital, in Newport, Wales, for the cautionary medical report, "A Man Who Pricked His Finger and Smelled Putrid for 5 Years."

LITERATURE
Dr. Mara Sidoli of Washington, DC, for her illuminating report, "Farting as a Defence Against Unspeakable Dread."


The 1997 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

BIOLOGY
T. Yagyu and his colleagues from the University Hospital
of Zurich, Switzerland, from Kansai Medical University in Osaka,
Japan, and from Neuroscience Technology Research in Prague, Czech
Republic, for measuring people's brainwave patterns while they
chewed different flavors of gum.

ENTOMOLOGY
Mark Hostetler of the University of Florida, for his
scholarly book, "That Gunk on Your Car," which identifies the
insect splats that appear on automobile windows.

ASTRONOMY
Richard Hoagland of New Jersey, for identifying
artificial features on the moon and on Mars, including a human
face on Mars and ten-mile high buildings on the far side of the
moon.

COMMUNICATIONS
Sanford Wallace, president of Cyber Promotions of
Philadelphia -- neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night have
stayed this self-appointed courier from delivering electronic junk
mail to all the world.

PHYSICS
John Bockris of Texas A&M University, for his wide-
ranging achievements in cold fusion, in the transmutation of base
elements into gold, and in the electrochemical incineration of
domestic rubbish.

LITERATURE
Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg of
Israel, and Michael Drosnin of the United States, for their
hairsplitting statistical discovery that the bible contains a
secret, hidden code.

MEDICINE
Carl J. Charnetski and Francis X. Brennan, Jr. of Wilkes
University, and James F. Harrison of Muzak Ltd. in Seattle,
Washington, for their discovery that listening to elevator Muzak
stimulates immunoblobulin A (IgA) production, and thus may help
prevent the common cold.

ECONOMICS
Akihiro Yokoi of Wiz Company in Chiba, Japan and Aki
Maita of Bandai Company in Tokyo, the father and mother of
Tamagotchi, for diverting millions of person-hours of work into
the husbandry of virtual pets.

PEACE
Harold Hillman of the University of Surrey, England for his
lovingly rendered and ultimately peaceful report "The Possible
Pain Experienced During Execution by Different Methods."


METEOROLOGY
Bernard Vonnegut of the State University of Albany,
for his revealing report, "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado
Wind Speed."

The 1996 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

BIOLOGY
Anders Barheim and Hogne Sandvik of the University of Bergen,
Norway, for their tasty and tasteful report, "Effect of Ale,
Garlic, and Soured Cream on the Appetite of Leeches."

MEDICINE
James Johnston of R.J. Reynolds, Joseph Taddeo of U.S. Tobacco,
Andrew Tisch of Lorillard, William Campbell of Philip Morris,
Edward A. Horrigan of Liggett Group, Donald S. Johnston of American
Tobacco Company, and the late Thomas E. Sandefur, Jr., chairman of
Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co. for their unshakable discovery,
as testified to the U.S. Congress, that nicotine is not addictive.

PHYSICS
Robert Matthews of Aston University, England, for his studies of
Murphy's Law, and especially for demonstrating that toast often
falls on the buttered side.

PEACE
Jacques Chirac, President of France, for commemorating the
fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic bomb tests in the
Pacific.

PUBLIC HEALTH
Ellen Kleist of Nuuk, Greenland and Harald Moi of Oslo, Norway,
for their cautionary medical report "Transmission of Gonorrhea
Through an Inflatable Doll."

CHEMISTRY
George Goble of Purdue University, for his blistering world record
time for igniting a barbeque grill-three seconds, using charcoal
and liquid oxygen.

BIODIVERSITY
Chonosuke Okamura of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya,
Japan, for discovering the fossils of dinosaurs, horses, dragons,
princesses, and more than 1000 other extinct "mini-species," each
of which is less than 1/100 of an inch in length.

LITERATURE
The editors of the journal "Social Text," for eagerly publishing
research that they could not understand, that the author said was
meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist.

ECONOMICS
Dr. Robert J. Genco of the University of Buffalo for his discovery
that "financial strain is a risk indicator for destructive
periodontal disease.

ART
Don Featherstone of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for his ornamentally
evolutionary invention, the plastic pink flamingo.


The 1995 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

NUTRITION
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.

PHYSICS
D.M.R. Georget, R. Parker, and A.C. Smith, of the Institute of
Food Research, Norwich, England, for their rigorous analysis of
soggy breakfast cereal, published in the report entitled 'A Study
of the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behaviour of
Breakfast Cereal Flakes."

ECONOMICS
Awarded jointly to Nick Leeson and his superiors at Barings Bank
and to Robert Citron of Orange County, California, for using the
calculus of derivatives to demonstrate that every financial
institution has its limits.

MEDICINE
Marcia E. Buebel, David S. Shannahoff-Khalsa, and Michael R.
Boyle, for their invigorating study entitled "The Effects of
Unilateral Forced Nostril Breathing on Cognition."

LITERATURE
David B. Busch and James R. Starling, of Madison Wisconsin, for
their deeply penetrating research report, "Rectal foreign bodies:
Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World's
Literature." The citations include reports of, among other items:
seven light bulbs; a knife sharpener; two flashlights; a wire
spring; a snuff box; an oil can with potato stopper; eleven
different forms of fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs; a
jeweler's saw; a frozen pig's tail; a tin cup; a beer glass; and
one patient's remarkable ensemble collection consisting of
spectacles, a suitcase key, a tobacco pouch and a magazine.


PEACE
The Taiwan National Parliament, for demonstrating that politicians
gain more by punching, kicking and gouging each other than by
waging war against other nations.

PSYCHOLOGY
Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita, of Keio
University, for their success in training pigeons to discriminate
between the paintings of Picasso and those of Monet.

PUBLIC HEALTH
Martha Kold Bakkevig of Sintef Unimed in Trondheim, Norway, and
Ruth Nielsen of the Technical University of Denmark, for their
exhaustive study, "Impact of Wet Underwear on Thermoregulatory
Responses and Thermal Comfort in the Cold."

DENTISTRY
Robert H. Beaumont, of Shoreview, Minnesota, for his incisive
study "Patient Preference for Waxed or Unwaxed Dental Floss."


CHEMISTRY
Bijan Pakzad of Beverly Hills, for creating DNA Cologne and DNA
PERFUME, neither of which contain deoxyribonucleic acid, and both
of which come in a triple helix bottle.

The 1994 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

BIOLOGY
W. Brian Sweeney, Brian Krafte-Jacobs, Jeffrey W. Britton, and
Wayne Hansen, for their breakthrough study, "The Constipated
Serviceman: Prevalence Among Deployed US Troops," and especially
for their numerical analysis of bowel movement frequency.


PEACE
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.


MEDICINE
This prize is 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."


ENTOMOLOGY
Robert A. Lopez of Westport, NY, valiant veterinarian and friend
of all creatures great and small, for his series of experiments in
obtaining ear mites from cats, inserting them into his own ear,
and carefully observing and analyzing the results.

PSYCHOLOGY
Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of Singapore, practitioner of
the psychology of negative reinforcement, for his thirty-year
study of the effects of punishing three million citizens of
Singapore whenever they spat, chewed gum, or fed pigeons.

LITERATURE
L. Ron Hubbard, ardent author of science fiction and founding
father of Scientology, for his crackling Good Book, "Dianetics,"
which is highly profitable to mankind or to a portion thereof.

CHEMISTRY
Texas State Senator Bob Glasgow, wise writer of logical
legislation, for sponsoring the 1989 drug control law which make
it illegal to purchase beakers, flasks, test tubes, or other
laboratory glassware without a permit.

ECONOMICS
Jan Pablo Davila of Chile, tireless trader of financial futures
and former employee of the state-owned Codelco Company, for
instructing his computer to "buy" when he meant "sell," and
subsequently attempting to recoup his losses by making
increasingly unprofitable trades that ultimately lost .5 percent
of Chile's gross national product. Davila's relentless achievement
inspired his countrymen to coin a new verb: " davilar," meaning,
"to botch things up royally."

MATHEMATICS
The Southern Baptist Church of Alabama, mathematical measurers of
morality, for their county-by-county estimate of how many Alabama
citizens will go to Hell if they don't repent.


The 1993 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

PSYCHOLOGY
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.

CONSUMER ENGINEERING
Ron Popeil, incessant inventor and perpetual pitchman of late
night television, for redefining the industrial revolution with
such devices as the Veg-O-Matic, the Pocket Fisherman, Mr. Microphone, and the Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler.


BIOLOGY
Paul Williams Jr. of the Oregon State Health Division and Kenneth
W. Newell of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, bold
biological detectives, for their pioneering study, "Salmonella
Excretion in Joy-Riding Pigs."

ECONOMICS
Ravi Batra of Southern Methodist University, shrewd economist and
best-selling author of "The Great Depression of 1990" ($17.95) and
"Surviving the Great Depression of 1990" ($18.95), for selling
enough copies of his books to single-handedly prevent worldwide
economic collapse.

PEACE
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.

VISIONARY TECHNOLOGY
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.

CHEMISTRY
James Campbell and Gaines Campbell of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee,
dedicated deliverers of fragrance, for inventing scent strips, the
odious method by which perfume is applied to magazine pages.

LITERATURE
E. Topol, R. Califf, F. Van de Werf, P. W. Armstrong, and
their 972 co-authors, for publishing a medical research paper
which has one hundred times as many authors as pages.
[The study was published in The New England Journal of
Medicine, vol. 329, no. 10, September 2, 1993, pp. 673-82. The authors are from the following countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.]


MATHEMATICS
Robert Faid of Greenville, South Carolina, farsighted and faithful
seer of statistics, for calculating the exact odds
(710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1) that Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist.


PHYSICS
Louis Kervran of France, ardent admirer of alchemy, for his
conclusion that the calcium in chickens' eggshells is created by a
process of cold fusion.

MEDICINE
James F. Nolan, Thomas J. Stillwell, and John P. Sands, Jr.,
medical men of mercy, for their painstaking research report,
"Acute Management of the Zipper-Entrapped Penis."

The 1992 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

MEDICINE
F. Kanda, E. Yagi, M. Fukuda, K. Nakajima, T. Ohta and O. Nakata
of the Shisedo Research Center in Yokohama, for their pioneering
research study "Elucidation of Chemical Compounds Responsible for
Foot Malodour," especially for their conclusion that people who
think they have foot odor do, and those who don't, don't.


ARCHEOLOGY
Eclaireurs de France, the Protestant youth group whose name means
"those who show the way," fresh-scrubbed removers of grafitti, for
erasing the ancient paintings from the walls of the Meyrieres Cave
near the French village of Bruniquel.

ECONOMICS
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.

BIOLOGY
Dr. Cecil Jacobson, relentlessly generous sperm donor, and
prolific patriarch of sperm banking, for devising a simple,
single-handed method of quality control.

CHEMISTRY
Ivette Bassa, constructor of colorfulcolloids, for her role in
the crowning achievement of twentieth century chemistry, the
synthesis of bright blue Jell-O.

PHYSICS
David Chorley and Doug Bower, lions of low-energy physics, for
their circular contributions to field theory based on the
geometrical destruction of English crops.

PEACE
Daryl Gates, former Police Chief of the City of Los Angeles, for
his uniquely compelling methods of bringing people together.

NUTRITION
The utilizers of Spam, courageous consumers of canned comestibles,
for 54 years of undiscriminating digestion.

LITERATURE
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.

ART
Presented jointly to Jim Knowlton, modern Renaissance man, for his
classic anatomy poster "Penises of the Animal Kingdom," and to the
U.S. National Endowment for the Arts for encouraging Mr. Knowlton
to extend his work in the form of a pop-up book.

The 1991 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

CHEMISTRY
Jacques Benveniste, prolific proseletizer and dedicated
correspondent of "Nature," for his persistent discovery that
water, H2O, is an intelligent liquid, and for demonstrating to his
satisfaction that water is able to remember events long after all
trace of those events has vanished.

MEDICINE
Alan Kligerman, deviser of digestive deliverance, vanquisher of
vapor, and inventor of Beano, for his pioneering work with anti-
gas liquids that prevent bloat, gassiness, discomfort and
embarassment.

EDUCATION
J. Danforth Quayle, consumer of time and occupier of space, for
demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science
education.

BIOLOGY
Robert Klark Graham, selector of seeds and prophet of propagation,
for his pioneering development of the Repository for Germinal
Choice, a sperm bank that accepts donations only from Nobellians
and Olympians.

ECONOMICS
Michael Milken, titan of Wall Street and father of the junk bond,
to whom the world is indebted.

LITERATURE
Erich Von Daniken, visionary raconteur and author of "Chariots of
the Gods," for explaining how human civilization was influenced by
ancient astronauts from outer space.

PEACE
Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and first champion of
the Star Wars weapons system, for his lifelong efforts to change
the meaning of peace as we know it.