2014 Ig Nobel Prize Winners announced

The 2014 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on 18 September at the 24th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, held at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre. Described by the journal Nature as “arguably the highlight of the scientific calendar”, the awards for improbable research honour scientific achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think.

This year’s Physics Prize was awarded to researchers from Kitasato University, Japan. The team measured the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that’s on the floor.

The Neuroscience Prize was meanwhile awarded to a Chinese-Canadian collaboration who attempted to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. The researchers suggest that “human face processing has a strong top-down component whereby sensory input with even the slightest suggestion of a face can result in the interpretation of a face”.

The winners of the Psychology Prize amassed evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, manipulative and psychopathic than people who habitually arise early in the morning. The team included Australian Peter K Jonason, from the University of Western Sydney.

The Public Health Prize winners investigated whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat. And still on the topic of animals, the Arctic Science Prize winners tested how reindeer react to seeing humans who are disguised as polar bears.

Continuing the animal theme, the winners of the Biology Prize carefully documented that when dogs defecate and urinate, they prefer to align their body axis with Earth’s north-south geomagnetic field lines. They weren’t the only team to deal in defecation - Spanish researchers won the Nutrition Prize after trawling through baby faeces to obtain bacteria that could both ferment sausages and also pass through the stomach to colonise the gut.

In an unusual use of a scientific instrument, Italian researchers won the Art Prize for measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather than a pretty painting, while being shot in the hand by a powerful laser beam. Italy additionally received the Economics Prize, for its National Institute of Statistics increasing the official size of its national economy by including revenues from unlawful financial transactions between willing participants, including prostitution, drug sales and smuggling.

Finally, the Medicine Prize was awarded to a US-Indian collaboration which treated uncontrollable nosebleeds by packing the nasal passages with strips of cured pork. The researchers claimed their “nasal tampon … successfully stopped nasal haemorrhage promptly, effectively, and without sequelae”.

For more information about this year’s awards, visit http://www.improbable.com/ig/2014/.