Scientists who see world through their legs win Ig Nobel
Tattoo enthusiasts with Japanese-style art on their bodies at an international tattoo convention in London this week SCIENTIFIC research into how polyester pants affect the sex life of rats, what it’s like for a human to live like a badger and how different the world looks when viewed through your legs was honoured at this year’s Ig Nobel spoof awards.
The prizes will be awarded for a 26th consecutive year at Harvard University on Thursday by a group of actual Nobel Prize winners, and are intended to honour accomplishments in science and humanities that make one laugh, then think.
“The prizes are for something pretty unusual,” said Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, and awards host.
“Almost any other kind of award is for the best or worst.
“Best or worst is irrelevant to us,” Abrahams said.
Timeliness is also of limited consideration: The Ig Nobel Reproduction Prize, for example, went to the late Ahmed Shafik of Egypt, who died in 2007, for a 1993 paper documenting that rats that wore polyester or polyester-cotton blend pants were less sexually active than those that wore cotton or wool pants.
The paper suggested that “electrostatic fields” created by polyester pants could play a role in impotence.
Two Britons split this year’s Biology Ig Nobel. Oxford University fellow Charles Foster was honoured for his book Being a Beast, chronicling his experiments in living as a badger, including digging a den to sleep in and eating worms. Countryman Thomas Thwaites’ built a set of prosthetic leg extensions to try living like a goat in Switzerland.
Japan’s Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi were granted the Perception Ig Nobel for a paper on how objects look different when one views them through one’s legs. —