Who on earth would want to know, let alone conduct research, into whether rats are able to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards? The chances of meeting a Japanese and Dutch person engaged in backward conversation in the presence of rat must be quite phenominal.
Yet this research was carried out at Barcelona University, a project for which they were awarded the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize for Linguistics.
The Ig Nobel awards were founded in 1991by the science magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) and are actually quite coveted. There is an awards ceremony each year at Harvard University and the prizes are often presented by official Nobel laureates.
The idea is apparently to ‘celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine and technology’. The research is genuine and real, just in rather strange or unusual spheres. All the research is published, often in prestigious journals, it’s just that we rarely get to hear about it.
The winners for 2008 were:
- Nutrition: Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence for their study showing that food actually tastes better if it sounds crunchier.
- Peace: The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.
- Archaeology: Astolfo Gomes de Mello Araujo and Jose Carlos Marcelino for demonstrating that armadillos can turn the contents of an archaeological dig upside down.
- Biology: Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert and Michel Franc for showing that fleas on dogs can jump higher than fleas on a cats.
- Medicine: Dan Ariely for demonstrating that expensive fake medicine is more effective than cheap fake medicine.
- Cognitive Science: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Hiroyasu Yamada, Ryo Kobayashi, Atsushi Tero, Akio Ishiguro and Agota Toth for demonstrating that slime moulds can solve puzzles.
- Economics: Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tyber and Brent Jordan for discovering that the fertility cycle of a lap dancer affects her tip-earning potential.
- Physics: Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith for proving that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.
- Chemistry: Sheree Umpierre, Joseph Hill and Deborah Anderson for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide (it was shared with C.Y. Hong, C.C. Shieh, P. Wu and B.N. Chiang who showed the opposite).
- Literature: David Sims for his passionately written study “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations.”
Useful stuff. A nice party trick (get your slime mould to solve the Times crossword faster than the host), a betting coup (find a flea jumping contest and make a killing with your inside knowledge) and have a readymade excuse next time you overcook the cornflakes.