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Weird discoveries feted at funny awards
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An experiment that proved people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive and another that showed lost dung beetles can use the Milky Way to find their way home were among the winners at this year’s Ig Nobel awards ceremony held on Thursday.
This is the 23rd year for the award, sponsored by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research and given out to honor weird and humorous scientific discoveries. The winners come from all over the world. Actual Nobel laureates announced the winners during a ceremony at Harvard University.
Editor Marc Abrahams, who organized the ceremony, said the point is to make people laugh and then think.
“The combination of science that is funny on its own — not because someone is making a joke, but it is funny — that’s an unusual notion in the United States,” he said. “It is becoming more acceptable again.”
For the first time, the winners received cash prizes — 10 trillion but in Zimbabwe dollars. So they’ll each get about US$4.
The awards ceremonies are usually silly, and this year’s was no different. It included a mini-opera and a contest to win a date with a Nobel laureate.
The winners will give short speeches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology today.
The psychology prize went to the experiment that found people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive, done by Laurent Begue, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra and Medhi Ourabah of France and Brad Bushman, a professor at Ohio State University who also teaches in the Netherlands.
The dung beetle navigation experiment won the joint prize in biology and astronomy, given to Marie Dacke, Emily Baird, Marcus Byrne, Clarke Scholtz and Eric Warrant, who work in Sweden, Australia, South Africa, the United Kingdom and Germany, respectively.
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