LAUGH THEN THINK – HARDER. The Ig® Nobel Prizes were awarded last week. The prizes celebrate some of the most imaginative, unusual, and peculiar scientific achievements of the year. For 2016, the winners included:
• Economics: Journalism and marketing professors from New Zealand and Britain for their work in marketing theory. The winning paper was entitled, “The Brand Personality of Rocks: A Critical Evaluation of a Brand Personality Scale.”
• Physics: A slew of Hungarian, Spanish, Swedish, and Swiss researchers for dual discoveries. They explored and confirmed the reasons that white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof, as well as the reasons dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones.
• Chemistry: A certain German automobile manufacturer for “…solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested.”
• Medicine: German researchers who authored a paper titled, “Itch Relief by Mirror Scratching. A Psychophysical Study.” Apparently, anyone with an itch on the left side of the body can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of the body, and vice versa.
• Biology: A Brit who built prosthetic limb extensions with plastic hooves and wore a helmet to romp and butt heads with goats during the three days that he lived among them. His co-winner was another British Islander who lived in the wild as a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird.
The winners’ accomplishments were celebrated at Harvard University where winners “physically receive their prizes and a handshake from genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel laureates.”
Weekly Focus – Think About It
“I have lived as a badger in a hole in a Welsh wood, as an otter in the rivers of Exmoor, an urban fox rummaging through the dustbins of London’s East End, a red deer in the West Highlands of Scotland and on Exmoor, and, most hubristically, a swift, oscillating between Oxford and West Africa…Why I did this is not an unreasonable question. There are many answers. One is that I wanted to perceive landscapes more accurately. We have at least five senses. By and large we use only one of them – vision. That’s a shame…I suspect it’s responsible for lots of our uncertainty about the sort of creatures we are, our personal crises, and the frankly psychopathic way in which most of us treat the natural world.”
–Charles Foster, Ig Nobel Prize winner
Sources:
http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/
http://www.improbable.com/ig/2016/
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