2015 Ig Nobel Prizes honor improbable research

The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded each year to recognize improbable research. The stated intention of the prizes is to “honor achievements that make people LAUGH, and then THINK” and “celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.” Every year, at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, 10 prizes are handed out to the winners by Nobel Laureates. These unusual prizes, organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, were first awarded in 1991.

The winners of the 2015 Ig Nobel Prizes were announced on September 17 at the 25th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The details of the laureates that major stakeholders of science and research would find interesting are as follows:

The Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize

To Callum Ormonde and colleagues at the University of Western Australia for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg

The Ig Nobel Physics Prize

To Patricia Yang at Georgia Institute of Technology, US, for testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds)

The Ig Nobel Medicine Prize

To Hajime Kimata at Kimata Hajime Clinic, Japan, and also Jaroslava Durdiaková at Comenius University, Slovakia, and her colleagues for experiments on and study of the biomedical benefits or biomedical consequences of intense kissing (and other intimate, interpersonal activities)

The Ig Nobel Mathematics Prize

To Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer at the University of Vienna, Austria, for trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children

The Ig Nobel Biology Prize

To Bruno Grossi and colleagues at the University of Chile, for observing that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked

The Ig Nobel Diagnostic Medicine Prize

To Diallah Karim and colleagues at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, UK, for determining that acute appendicitis can be accurately diagnosed by the amount of pain evident when the patient is driven over speed bumps

The Ig Nobel Physiology and Entomology Prize

To Justin Schmidt at Southwest Biological Institute, US, for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects; and to Michael L. Smith at the Cornell University, US, for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are the least painful (the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm) and which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft).

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Congratulations to all the winners!