EVERY year in Norway, Nobel Prizes are awarded to scientists who have made outstanding contributions to human knowledge. The Ig Nobel Prizes, a parody of Nobel Prizes, are handed out also every year at Harvard University (Cambridge, U.S.A.), but at a far less formal ceremony, to scientists recognizing work that may never win recognition from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science. The Ig Nobel Prizes demonstrate the lighter side of science and academia.
The name “Ig Nobel“ comes from word “ignoble“ (characterized by baseless, lowness, or meanness) and the word “Nobel“ is after Nobel Prize.
For this year, the award for biology was given out to a team for discovering that certain types of beetles try to mate with particular types of short, dark beer bottles in Australia, which they confuse for female beetles. Japanese researchers have been awarded in Chemistry for their patented invention, the Wasabi Smoke Alarm, based on the pungent sushi condiment wasabi, to wake up people with hearing disabilities. Other winners have researched looking at why we sigh, whether yawning is contagious in the Red-Footed Tortoise, and some more unusual and imaginative researches.
Winners in the past years include; a team showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting, Daisuke Inoue, for inventing Karaoke, a team who investigated the scientific validity of the five-seconds rule about whether it’s safe to eat food that’s been dropped on the floor, Howard Stapleton for inventing an electromechanical teenagerrepellant, device that makes an annoying high-pitched noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults, (later used to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers only), Mayu Yamamoto, for extracting vanilla flavor from cow dung, and so on.
