Last night Cambridge’s clown school gave the world’s best and brightest the awards they deserved. Harvard University hosted its 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, where its Annals of Improbable Research recognized the usual combination of mad scientists and asinine leaders.
Pulling in the biology prize was a Japanese team that discovered pandas are more than just cuddly tax dollar vacuums — their poop packs a potent punch. The group isolated bacteria in panda feces that can reduce kitchen waste by more than 90 percent in mass. Good news, given that pandas produce about 40 pounds of poop a day — and as one might expect, it doesn’t stink.
The Ig Nobel prizes also continued their fascination with skivvies. Back in 2001 the biology prize went to the inventor of panties that filter out flatulence with a replaceable charcoal filter, and this year the public health prize went to the inventors of a bra that can be “quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander” — in this case that needy bystander was Wolfgang Ketterle, 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Speaking of over-the-shoulder boulder holders, why doesn’t a pregnant woman’s bulbous tummy need one? An American group was awarded the physics prize for cracking that conundrum, and published their findings in our very own Nature in 2007.
The non-science awards included an economics prize for “the directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks … for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy”, and the peace prize for a study that finds “it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer than with an empty bottle” — though apparently both will fracture the skull. The mathematics prize went to the governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for printing bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars.