Ig Nobel Prizes of 2005
This years Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded in the following categories to the following people for the following reasons:
- Agricultural history, to James Watson, for the study into “The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley’s Exploding Trousers”.
- Physics: John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell for dripping tar at a rate of one drip per nine years (experiment still ongoing).
- Medicine: Gregg Miller for inventing artificial testicles for castrated dogs.
- Literature: the collective Nigerian scam spammers, for their entire œuvre.
- Peace: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons for 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 for inventing an alarm clock that hides from its owner.
- Chemistry: Edward Cussler and Brian Gettelfinger for determining experimentally whether people swim faster in syrup or water.
- Biology: Benjamin Smith and others for catalogueing 131 smells of stressed out frogs. (Presumably the new Axe commercial has Kermit running from miss Piggy.)
- Nutrition: Yoshiro Nakamats for taking photos of all his meals of the past 34 years (experiment still on-going).
- Fluid Dynamics: Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow and Jozsef Gal for calculating the pressures that build in a penguin while defacating.