A playful parody of the Nobel Prizes with mixing anchovies and bored teachers

For the fourth consecutive year, the Ig Nobel Prize Award Ceremony will be a fully online event, “due to the Covid-19 pandemic.” Apparently, the organizers still estimate the risk of infection with the coronavirus in the United States to be higher than here, where mass gatherings are again an everyday practice. So the traditional stage, the Sanders Theater on the campus of Harvard University, remains empty for the “Thirty-third First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony.”

The organization, as always led by Marc Abrahams, editor of the equally parodic scientific magazine Annals of Improbable Researchnever miss an opportunity to make corny jokes.

For the online ceremony, they came up with a goblet in the form of a PDF that could be sent electronically so that the prize winners could assemble it themselves. This way they could receive the prize remotely from only real Nobel Prize winners who had folded just such a paper cup.

Unlike the real Nobel Prize, a specific discovery is not rewarded, but rather remarkable articles published in the scientific literature.

This year ten won prizes. For example, the Communication Prize went to an international team that mapped the brain activity of test subjects who talked backwards. The Medicine Prize went to the morbid research of another international team that had inventoried whether the same number of nose hairs grew in both nostrils of twenty deceased people (ten men, ten women). Result: there is an approximately equal distribution with an average of 120 hairs per nostril.