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

Davey Winder
Saturday, 04 October 2008 15:16

Science - Biology

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry is an odd one. No really. In that it was awarded to two opposing camps of research.

A bunch from the USA picked it up for proving that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and a bunch from Taiwan were awarded the same honour for proving that Coca-Cola is not an effective spermicide.

More straightforward, and not open to any argument I would image, is the award for physics. This went to Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego for using math to prove that a heap of hair will always get tangled in knots.

Now things get really exciting, with the announcement of the 'big two' Ig Nobel Prizes for 2008: Literature and Peace.

The winner of the prize for literature goes to David Sims of Cass Business School in London for what the Ig Noble organisers called "his lovingly written study" which went by the title of 'You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations.'

Which brings us to the main event, and the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize for peace. Not quite up there with stopping the violence in the Middle East, or defeating global terrorism, but deserving of such an accolade I am sure.

And the winner is: the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology, along with the citizens of Switzerland, for accepting the legal principle that plants have dignity.

I couldn't end without a quick nod to last years peace prize winner, the Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. It won for instigating the research and development of a 'gay bomb' to make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.

You can view all the winners, going back across many years, at the official Ig Nobel Prize website.