The annals of science brim with researchers who pushed the boundaries of sense and good taste in a laudable quest for knowledge. With the unveiling of the 30th annual Ig Nobel awards, another case shall be added.
To test the validity of a story in a work of ethnographic literature, Metin Eren, an anthropologist at Kent State University in Ohio, made a knife from his frozen feces. He then set about butchering an animal hide, an endeavor that ended in failure.
“It’s an honor to be recognized,” Eren said, before the ceremony in which he was honored for his work on Thursday. “I’ve followed the Ig Nobels my entire life. It’s a dream come true. Really.”
Not to be mistaken for the more prestigious — and lucrative — Nobel prizes, to be doled out in Scandinavia next month, the Ig Nobels celebrate research that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think.”
In a ceremony held online, rather than at Harvard University as usual, 10 awards were handed out for notable achievements in physics, peace, psychology, economics, medicine and more.
In lieu of a handsome windfall and medal, the winners received a paper cube and a 10 trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe.
This year’s awards included a physics prize for work that recorded the shapes earthworms adopt when vibrated at high frequency.
The peace prize honored the governments of India and Pakistan for having their diplomats ring each other’s doorbells in the middle of the night and run away before anyone answered.
Chris Watkins, a psychologist at the University of Abertay in Scotland, shared the economics prize.
His research found that French kissing was more common between partners in areas of high income inequality.
“If kissing, as hypothesized, is an important gesture for keeping a long-term relationship going, our data show that people engage in it more in economically harsher environments,” he said.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson shared the medical education prize with US president Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and a choice selection of other world leaders for demonstrating during the COVID-19 pandemic that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can.
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