Dog fleas jump higher than cat fleas (and other 2008 Ig Nobel Prize winners)

by Davey Winder

Saturday, 04 October 2008

Page 1 of 3 ! The 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes have been dished out at the 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. Can comparing cat and dog flea jumping ability really spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology? Heck, you ain't seen nothing yet... The Ig Nobel Prizes, a parody of the proper Nobel Prizes, honour those achievements in similar categories which "first make people laugh, and then make them think." Intended to celebrate the unusual and honour the imaginative, and take the mick out the stupid perhaps, there is no doubting the impact these awards have had. Certainly the 2008 Biology prize winners, Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France made me laugh for their earth-shattering discovery that fleas living on a dog can jump higher than fleas living on a cat. They also made me think, mainly along the lines of 'someone got paid to spend time researching that? cool!' Then there were the winners of the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize for nutrition. Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento and Charles Spence of Oxford University who electronically changed the sound that a potato chip makes so that the person eating it thinks it is crisper than it is. Haters of stale crisps the world over will, no doubt, be jumping for joy. Whether they will jump higher, relatively speaking, than dog fleas is something that can be left for next years awards perhaps. As we progress through the award winners, predictably, things do not get any more serious. Unless you think that research which measures how much damage an armadillo can do to the contents of a dig site is time well spent. That won the archaeology prize for Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and Jose Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil by the way. Want to know who else picked up a 2008 Ig Nobel and for what? More winners on page 2... CONTINUES << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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