Skip to main content

The Ig Nobel Prizes: Laugh and then Think

By

The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded for the Improbable Research.

This year, the 27th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony was held. The event, which is taking place since 1991, has managed to please the world with "great" and "important" discoveries more than

WHAT??

Improbable Research is the research that makes people laugh and then think. Real Research, about anything and everything, from everywhere. Research that may be good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. 


WHY??

The goal is to make people LAUGH and then THINK. I hope to spur people's curiosity and raise the question: How do you decide what's essential and what's not and what's real and what's not - in science and everywhere else?

IG Nobel Prize - Information, Nominations & Winners | Improb

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but. That's funny" - Issac Asimov.


The Ig Nobel Prize

The Ig Nobel Prize is a satiric prize awarded to celebrate ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research, with the aim being to honor achievements that first make you laugh and then think. The name of the award prize is the pun to the Nobel Prize, which it parodies and the word ignoble. Ig Nobel prizes are awarded by actual Nobel Laureates.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular

Frugal Science: Science for all

By
 Science is not just about knowing but also about experiencing.  Today with the boon of technological advancement we have easy access to information and knowledge which is merely a click away. Science is largely about learning and it comes through the experience. So, it's more important how you can make the experience of science more accessible to a lot of people around the world.  The actual experience of science is utilizing scientific tools to make your own discoveries. Prof. Manu Prakash at Stanford University is in a quest of how can we make scientific tools that are so affordable, which are like buying a pencil from a shop, So what it would mean if a scientific tool is as accessible as pencil? What you would actually do, would you sketch with it or would you write a poetry with it, what exactly is the end of that for science? Prakash Lab do this in different fields but mainly focusing on the microscopic world. So how do you make the microscopic world easily visible,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Remember to Sleep, Sleep to Remember

By
Sleep occupies nearly a third of our lives, but many of us give surprisingly little attention to it. This neglect is often the result of major misunderstandings. Sleep isn't lost time or a way to rest when all of our work is done. Instead, it's a critical function during which our body balances and regulates vital systems, affecting respiration and controlling right from circulation, growth, and immune response.  But, we care more about that test which we have tomorrow morning, right? One should certainly not; it turns out that sleep is also very crucial for the brain, with a fifth of the body's circulatory blood being channeled to it when you are drift off. And, what goes on in our brain while we sleep is an intensely active period of restructuring, which is crucial for memory function.  According to psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus, we usually forget 40% of new material within the first 20 minutes, known as the forgetting curve. But fortunately, this loss can be prevented b...
Post a Comment
Read more

Foldscope: The Paper Microscope

By
 Foldscope is an ultra-affordable paper microscope which can be folded with a sheet of paper.  Foldscope is created with a vision to solve the accessibility problem in Science. It is designed to be portable and durable while performing on par with conventional research microscopes ( 140X magnification and 2 micron resolution ). Foldscope which began as a simple idea has now grown into a company that provides low cost tools to communities around the world to discover the world around and interpret it their own way.  A foldscope is an optical microscope that can be assembled using simple components like sheet of papers and lens. It is developed by Manu Prakash and designed to cost less than US$1 to build. It is the part of the frugal science movement which aims to make cheap and easy tools available for scientific use in the developing world. The mission is to break down the price barrier between people and the curiosity and the excitement of scientific exploration! With t...
Post a Comment
Read more