IG NOBEL PRIZES
Added on: 6th Mar 2015
PROBABILITY: Bert Tolkamp and Marie Haskell for making two
related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down,
the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and second, that once
a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that
cow will lie down again.
PEACE: Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making
it illegal to applaud in public, AND to the Belarus State Police,
for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.
PSYCHOLOGY: Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan for their study
"Leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower seem smaller"
LITERATURE: The US Government General Accountability Office,
for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the
preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.
PHYSIOLOGY: Anna Wilkinson and Ludwig Huber for their study
"No evidence of contagious yawning in the red-footed tortoise
Geochelone carbonaria".
PHYSICS: Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, and Herman Kingma for
trying to determine why discus throwers become dizzy, and why
hammer throwers don't, in their paper "Dizziness in discus throwers
is related to motion sickness generated while spinning"
PEACE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, for
demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be
solved by running them over with a tank
CHEMISTRY: Makoto Imai and Hideki Tanemura for determining the
ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken
sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying
this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm
PHYSICS: Lianne Parkin and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago,
New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime,
people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the
outside of their shoes.
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