“THE NUTTY-PROFESSOR AWARD GOES TO ...”

The Ig Nobel Prize is a tongue-in-cheek award given each year to actual research projects that seem—well, silly. The winners are published in a humorous periodical, Annals of Improbable Research.

economics Researchers in Canada and the United States, for investigating whether it is effective for employees to use voodoo dolls to retaliate against abusive bosses. (Their finding: It is!)

biology Researchers in Sweden, Colombia, and Germany, for demonstrating that wine experts can reliably identify, by smell, the presence of a single fly in a glass of wine.

chemistry Three Portuguese researchers, for measuring the degree to which human saliva is a good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces.

peace Researchers in Spain, for measuring the frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an automobile.

nutrition A lecturer at England’s University of Brighton, for calculating that the caloric intake from a human-cannibalism diet is significantly lower than the caloric intake from most other traditional meat diets.