SOMEDAY SCIENCE WILL SAVE THE WORLD...BUT NOT YET

It’s that time once again when the most useless scientific research of the year is honoured with the Ig Nobel Awards. The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony was created by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research in order to recognize “achievements” in science which would otherwise go unnoticed because they are so stupid. A few of the “winners” include a team of Californian researchers who explored why woodpeckers don’t get headaches and an inventor who created an electromechanical teeneger repellant (a device which makes annoying noises which only teenagers can hear, and has been used with success outside of suburban 7-11 stores... no really, I’m not making this up). In the field of Mathematics, Australian researchers won the prize for calculating the number of photographs you must take to ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed, while the prize in Acoustics went to scientists who conducted experiments to discover why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard in their paper titled “Psychoacoustics of a Chilling Sound.” Finally, my favorite, the prize in Medicine which went to doctors who discovered that a finger up the anus could cure hiccups in their research published under the title “Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage.” The complete list of winners is at Improbable.com