Every year for the past 25 years, the science humor journal Annals of Improbable Research, awards the Ig Nobel awards for "achievements that make people laugh, and then think."
The 2015 award ceremony was held this past Thursday at Harvard University.
1. There was a chemistry award that went to a group of Australian and American researchers who invented “a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg.”
2. Physicists from the US and Taiwan got a shoutout for testing “the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds).”
3. A prize in medicine was awarded to researchers that studied “the biomedical benefits" or "consequences of intense kissing (and other intimate, interpersonal activities).”
4. Mathematicians were lauded for their investigation into how the bloodthirsty Moroccan leader Moulay Ismael could have fathered 888 children.
5. Chilean and American biologists valiantly showed that “when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken” they walk kind of like dinosaurs.
View this video on YouTube
Chickens, of course, are the living descendants of dinosaurs after all. See for yourself!
6. There was also a prize in diagnostic medicine awarded to a group of researchers working in the UK that determined you can diagnose acute appendicitis by driving over speed bumps.
7. And the most heroic of all: A prize in “physiology and entomology” was awarded to people who let bees and other insects sting them (to see what hurt the most). Turns out it really hurts to get stung on the shaft of your penis.
