The 27th First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes will be announced at a special ceremony on Thursday evening, September 14, 2017.
Not to be confused with the Nobel Prizes usually announced in October in Stockholm, Sweden, the Ig Nobel Prizes are intended to “honor achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” As in past years, the ceremony will be held in the Sanders Theatre on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.
According to the website of Improbable Research, the host of the annual event, the prize winners are chosen from approximately 9000 nominations by a “genuine, and genuinely bemused” group of former Nobel Prize recipients. Winners are not publicly announced before the ceremony so they can quietly decline the honor without publicity. Those that do choose to accept travel at their own expense to the awards ceremony.
Last year’s Ig Nobel Prize winners included:
- For reproductive science, the late Ahmed Shafik for his research on the effects of wearing polyester, cotton or wool trousers on the sex life of rats;
- For economics, a team of researchers from New Zealand and the UK for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective;
- For physics, a tie between a multi-country team of researchers for determining why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof, and a separate team for discovering why dragonflies are fatally attracted to tombstones;
- For psychology, another multi-country team for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers;
- For peace, a Canada and U.S. team for their scholarly research “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit.”
- And, finally, for chemistry, the automaker Volkswagen for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested.
Get more information about this year’s awards ceremony and purchase tickets to the event.
