Researchers who swallowed a parboiled shrew, discovered that dung beetles navigate by the stars and invented a machine to launch hijackers from airplanes were among the winners of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes for comical scientific achievements.
The annual prizes, meant to entertain and encourage global research and innovation, are awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research as a whimsical counterpart to the Nobel Prizes which will be announced in October.
Ig Nobel prizes in 2013 also went to researchers who proved that people who think they are drunk also believe they are sexy, showed it would be possible to run across the surface of a pond if both the runner and the pond were on the moon, and explained in detail why onions make people cry. The US and Canadian researchers who swallowed the parboiled shrew, winners of the Archaeology Prize, were seeking to determine which of the rodent’s bones would dissolve inside the human digestive system. Former winners of real Nobels handed out the spoof awards at a ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massach-usetts, on Thursday night. A personal favourite of Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals and architect of the Ig Nobels, was this year’s winner for the Ig Nobel Public Health Prize, which went to a team of doctors in Thailand who developed specialised treatments for the victims of that country’s epidemic of penile amputations.
“There really was an epidemic of this happening, and a lot of the victims were brought to the same hospital and the doctors got pretty good at dealing with it,” he said, adding the victims were often drunk men who angered their wives.