Davey Winder
Saturday, 04 October 2008 15:16
Science -
Biology
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...
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