Honorees at this year’s Ig Nobels win $10 trillion in cash

Annual spoof prizes recognize quirky scientific achievement

BOSTON — A Swede who wrote about collecting bugs, an Egyptian doctor who put pants on rats and a British researcher who lived like an animal are winners of the Ig Nobels, the annual spoof prizes for quirky scientific achievement.

They were honored Thursday in a zany ceremony at Harvard University that featured a paper airplane air raid, and a tic-tac-toe contest with a brain surgeon, a rocket scientist and four real Nobel laureates.

Winners receive $10 trillion cash prizes — in virtually worthless Zimbabwean money.

This year’s Ig Nobels, sponsored by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, included research by Fredrik Sjoberg, who published three volumes about collecting hoverflies.

Sjoberg’s books are a hit in Sweden and the first volume’s English translation, “The Fly Trap,” has earned rave reviews. “The Ig Nobel Prize beats everything,” he said.

Ahmed Shafik decided rats needed pants.

He dressed his rodents in polyester, cotton, wool and polyester-cotton blend pants to determine the textiles’ effects on sex drive. The professor at Cairo University in Egypt, who died in 2007, found that rats that wore polyester or polyester blend pants displayed less sexual activity. He suggested the results could be applied to humans.

Charles Foster, a fellow at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, won for literally living like an animal. He spent months mimicking a badger, an otter, a fox, a deer and a bird in an attempt to see the world through their eyes, then wrote a book, “Being a Beast,” about his experiences.

Andreas Sprenger was part of a team at the University of Luebeck in Germany that found that, if you have an itch on one arm, you can relieve it by looking in a mirror and scratching the opposite arm. Imagine, Sprenger said via email, if you have a skin condition with an intolerable itch, you can scratch the other arm to relieve it without rubbing the affected arm.

Gordon Logan, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, and colleagues from Canada and Europe won for their research on lying. Their study of more than 1,000 people aged 6 to 77 found that young adults are the best liars.

How do the scientists know their subjects weren’t lying to them? “We don’t,” Logan said.