Watch the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony live from Harvard University, starting at 7:30 p.m. ET.
By Alan Boyle
'Tis the season for scientific awards: This week, the White House named 12 scientists and engineers who'll be receiving medals for their work, and next week the Nobel Prizes will be announced. And then there's the Ig Nobel?Prizes,?being?handed out?tonight?in Harvard amid?much fanfare and flying paper airplanes. You can watch the?Ig Nobels?live, starting at 7:30 p.m. ET, by clicking on the video above.
The "Ig" Nobels? For two decades, a science humor magazine called the Annals of Improbable Research has organized?the prize program to recognize scientific achievements that make you laugh, and then make you think. My favorite laureates?from past years include the South African?who installed a flamethrower on a car to fend off hijackers, the Japanese researchers who won the prize not just once, but twice, for teaching slime mold to figure out networking puzzles.
Some of the research is positively racy: Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded for studying the link between an exotic dancer's tips and her fertility, the sexual preferences of fruit bats and homosexual necrophilia in ducks.
But there's a serious point behind all this silly science: Research can sometimes take a weird turn on the way to valuable results. One Ig Nobel recognized a study of the bacteria found in whale snot, which sounds funny ... until you find out that the technique provided a useful way to gauge the health of endangered cetaceans.
Another prize was awarded in 2000 to a guy named Andre Geim who used magnetic fields?to levitate a frog. You might think that?Geim was frittering away his career, but last year he shared the Nobel Prize in physics for his work with graphene. Geim thus became the first person to win an Ig Nobel and go on to win a real Nobel.
Makes you think, doesn't it? Watch the live coverage of this year's Ig Nobel ceremony, find out who won for what weird research ... and then let me know what you think in the comment section below.
More about silly science:
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Source: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/29/8002625-watch-silly-science-at-work
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