An annual tradition here at In Compliance Magazine, we’re pleased to announce the winners of the 36th First Annual (not a typo!) Ig Nobel Prizes.
This year’s awards ceremony was held on September 3rd in Zurich, Switzerland, the first time that the awards ceremony was held in a location other than Cambridge/Boston in the United States. However, a small celebration of this year’s award winners will be held at the Swiss Consulate in Cambridge (U.S.), the evening of September 24th.
This year’s new Ig Nobel Prize award winners include:
- For biomechanics, a team of researchers from the UK and the U.S. for “devising a more precise definition of kissing…in ants, birds, polar bears, and humans;
- For medicine, the work of the late Tokuji Unno, a researcher in Japan, as presented in his paper “How to Blow the Nose—An Aerodynamic Study of Nose Blowing;”
- For biology, researchers from Brazil and Australia whose research “tried to learn what does and does not induce a venomous snake to bite a human;
- For physics, a consortium of researchers from Canada, the U.S., China, and Saudi Arabia for their “theoretical and experimental attempts to design a splash-free urinal;”
- For technology, a team of researchers from China, Canada, the U.S., and Egypt for “pioneering the use of mosquito proboscises as high-resolution 3D printing nozzles, a process called ‘Necroprinting’;”
- And, finally, for the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, researchers from the U.S., Argentina, and Australia for “documenting that we value friends who are vicious to people we dislike.”
If you’ve never heard of the Ig Nobel Prizes, they are not to be confused with the annual Nobel Prizes, typically announced in Oslo, Norway, in early October. Instead, the Ig Nobel Prizes “honor achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.”
