2012 Ig Nobel Prizes Awards
Posted on September 21, 2012
The 2012 Ig Nobel Prizes have been announced. Some of the scientific research studies awarded include minimizing explosions during colonoscopies, liquid-sloshing dynamics when a person carries a cup of coffee and the forces in a pontytail. Here are the winners:
Psychology Prize: Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan (The Netherlands) and Tulio Guadalupe (Peru, Russia and The Netherlands) for their study "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller"
Peace Prize: The SKN Company (Russia), for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.
Acoustics Prize: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada (Japan) for creating the SpeechJammer - a machine that disrupts a person's speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.
Neuroscience Prize: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford (USA), for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere - even in a dead salmon.
Chemistry Prize: Johan Pettersson (Sweden and Rwand) for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Andersl'v, Sweden, people's hair turned green.
Literature Prize: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.
Physics Prize: Joseph Keller (USA), and Raymond Goldstein (USA and UK), Patrick Warren, and Robin Ball (UK), for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.
Fluid Dynamics Prize: Rouslan Krechetnikov (USA, Russia, Canada) and Hans Mayer (USA) for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.
Anatomy Prize Frans de Waal (The Netherlands and USA) and Jennifer Pokorny (USA) for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.
Medicine Prize:Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti (France) for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.
Take a look:
The website for the Ig Nobel Prizes can be found here.
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