Skip to main content

The Ig Nobel Prizes: Laugh and then Think

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

Popular

Advancing medicine with Patient-on-a-Chip

Innovating with Organ-on-a-Chip technology. It is well known that patients responds very uniquely to various drugs and chemicals. For instance, a drug may be effective for a patient while it makes another one more ill. For a long time, we had no test to check the effects and response of these medicine or line of treatment individually for each patient . Patient-on-a-Chip holds the potential to advance the field of precision medicine and provide  clinicians with better information which can accurately predict patient's response to medications and treatment.    Organ-on-a-Chip technology can be used to recapitulate true-to-life biology outside the human body. These advanced systems can create micro-environment where cells exhibit unprecedented level of biological functions and facilitates control over complex human biology and disease mechanism which arduous with other techniques.  Scientist can harvest cells from the skin or blood of the patient. These cells...

Frugal Science: Science for all

 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,...

How Catastrophic is 1 Degree Celsius?

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges we face today, and the stakes could not be higher. The world has become keenly aware of the problem, and around the world, people are setting goals to solve it. To avoid the worst effects of a warming world- which will be catastrophic-humans need to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.  Since 1850 global average temperature has risen by 1 degree Celsius. That may not sound like a significant number, but it is.  Why? Let's find out. One degree is average. Many places on earth have gotten much warmer than that. Some areas in the Arctic have already warmed by 4 degrees. If the global average temperature increases by one more degree (total increase of 2 degrees), the coldest nights in the Arctic might get ten degrees warmer, and the warmest days in Mumbai might get 5 degrees hotter.  Wonder how do we get here? Everything we do is related to fossil fuels: Coal, Oil, and Gas, which are full of carbon that releases carbo...