The Annals of Improbable Research awarded their 2019 Ig Nobel Prizes on Thursday evening in a ceremony at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. These are bestowed every year for research that makes one laugh, and then makes one think. The most attention-grabbing winner was a study called "Thermal Asymmetry of the Human Scrotum," in which the temperature of the male subjects' left testicle was compared to the temperature of the right testicle. The Anatomy prize went to Roger Mieusset and Bourras Bengoudifa for their efforts. Continue reading for more winners.
The Medicine Prize went to Silvano Gallus for several papers on pizza consumption: “Does Pizza Protect Against Cancer?“, “Pizza and Risk of Acute Myocardial Infarction,” and “Pizza Consumption and the Risk of Breast, Ovarian and Prostate Cancer.”
The Medical Education Prize went to Karen Pryor and Theresa McKeon, "for using a simple animal-training technique— called “clicker training” —to train surgeons to perform orthopedic surgery." The paper is “Is Teaching Simple Surgical Skills Using an Operant Learning Program More Effective Than Teaching by Demonstration.”
The Biology Prize was won by Ling-Jun Kong, Herbert Crepaz, Agnieszka Górecka, Aleksandra Urbanek, Rainer Dumke, and Tomasz Paterek for “In-Vivo Biomagnetic Characterisation of the American Cockroach,”
The Chemistry Prize went to Shigeru Watanabe, Mineko Ohnishi, Kaori Imai, Eiji Kawano, and Seiji Igarashi of Japan for “Estimation of the Total Saliva Volume Produced Per Day in Five-Year-Old Children.”
The Engineering Prize went to Iman Farahbakhsh for patenting this: “Infant Washer and Diaper-Changer Apparatus and Method,”
The Economics Prize went to Habip Gedik, Timothy A. Voss, and Andreas Voss for their study “Money and Transmission of Bacteria,” which compares paper currency from different nations as to their germiness.
The Peace Prize went to Ghada A. bin Saif, Alexandru Papoiu, Liliana Banari, Francis McGlone, Shawn G. Kwatra, Yiong-Huak Chan, and Gil Yosipovitch for “The Pleasurability of Scratching an Itch: A Psychophysical and Topographical Assessment,”
The Psychology Prize was won by Fritz Strack for “Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: a nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis,” which was followed up by “From Data to Truth in Psychological Science. A Personal Perspective.” The hypothesis was that holding a pen in one's mouth to make one smile will make one happier, and the second found that the hypothesis did not hold up.
The Physics Prize went to Patricia Yang, Alexander Lee, Miles Chan, Alynn Martin, Ashley Edwards, Scott Carver, and David Hu for their breakthrough study of “How Do Wombats Make Cubed Poo?”
The awards ceremony is available in its entirety at YouTube. Read more about the winners at the Annals of Improbable Research.