The 22nd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, a celebration of the odd, weird and quirky side of science, took place this morning (NZT).
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.
This years winners included the authors of the study “Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller“, who received the Nobel prize in Psychology and a Russian company using old military munitions to create diamonds, which took home the peace prize.
Past Kiwi IgNobel Laureates include Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, for demonstrating with a randomised controlled trial that people slip and fall less often on icy footpaths in wintertime if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes, and James Watson of Massey University, New Zealand, for his scholarly study, “The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley’s Exploding Trousers.”
Highlights from the surreal and patently absurd ceremony will be soon be available here.