As the history of the 'Ig Nobel' shows, one of the scientific fields richest in breakthroughs is veterinary medicine.
And this decision is quite understandable, because in the first days of October, a week before the Nobel Prizes, their antipodes – the Ig Nobels – are awarded.
The Ig Nobel Prizes (often called Shnobel Prizes in Russia) were established by the humorous scientific journal 'The Annals of Improbable Research' in 1991. They are awarded for real (and often published) scientific works that 'cannot or should not be reproduced.' The laureates of the Ig Nobel Prizes are authors of absurd, strange, silly, or highly atypical studies. Often, the Ig Nobel is awarded to officials – and in that case, it can no longer be said that the organizers of the prize are joking good-naturedly.
Unlike the Nobel Prize, the Ig Nobel is awarded in ten categories. Six categories coincide with the Nobel categories, while the remaining four are varied by the Ig Nobel organizers from year to year. Such flexibility deserves all praise, as astonishing discoveries worthy of a worthy award can be made in any field of science.
One of the scientific fields richest in breakthroughs is veterinary medicine. Animal health specialists often notice surprising patterns. The laureate of the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in veterinary medicine studied the lives of cows for many years. As a result, she was able to scientifically substantiate farmers' observations such as 'The milk yields of Mashka and Zoyka are much higher than that of that red cow over there.' It turns out that cows without names experience significantly more stress daily than their named counterparts. As a result, the animals suffer and cannot produce milk normally.
The 2009 Ig Nobel showed that human health is also in safe hands. The prize in the 'Public Health' category went to the creator of the transformable bra and her colleagues. The invention looks like an ordinary piece of women's underwear, but in the event of an emergency, the owner can easily turn it into two gas masks. The author of such a useful item is a native of Ukraine who survived the Chernobyl disaster. At the award ceremony, she demonstrated to the audience how to use the unusual product and gave one prototype to each of the Nobel laureates present. Jokes aside, the gas mask bra was patented in the USA under number 7255627.
The laureate of the Ig Nobel Prize in medicine began his speech with the following words: "Mom, I know you can hear me. Mom, you were wrong!" It took allergist Donald Unger 60 years to prove his mother's beliefs wrong. In the late 1940s, Unger's mother, who was already 83 years old, forbade him to crack his knuckles. According to his mother, this bad habit would inevitably lead to arthritis. To test this claim, Unger cracked the knuckles of his left hand every day. He never cracked the knuckles of his right hand, using it as a negative control. As a result, the scientist found that there is no connection between knuckle cracking and arthritis. Speaking at the ceremony, Unger lamented that he had published many works on allergology, but fame came to him from a long-ago argument with his mother.
If Unger managed to prove the harmlessness of a bad habit, then a group of scientists from Mexico found that things traditionally considered harmful can bring considerable benefit. The researchers heated cheap silver tequila to 850 degrees Celsius and then irradiated it to a plasma state (ionized gas). The gas molecules struck a substrate, forming a thin diamond film on it. This unconventional way of consuming tequila earned the Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry.
The prize in physics went to specialists studying the geometric features of pregnancy. American researchers finally figured out why pregnant women do not tip over backward. It turned out that the shift in the center of gravity has nothing to do with it. Women carrying a child do not flip over thanks to a single vertebra that men do not have.
The work of the laureates of the Ig Nobel Prize in biology reflects the modern trend of reducing waste and reusing the same materials. A group of Japanese specialists proved that the mass of kitchen waste can be reduced by more than 90 percent if bacteria living in the feces of giant pandas are used for its processing. The widespread implementation of this method in practice can only be hindered by the catastrophic decline in the population of these animals.
Specialists awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize used the full power of the scientific approach to study the question of the optimal weapon for street fights. Numerous experiments on corpses proved that an empty beer bottle is much more effective in this regard than a full one. Empty containers are harder to break, meaning they allow for stronger blows. However, to crack a human skull, it turned out to be enough to apply just 14 Joules of work. This figure can also be achieved with a full bottle.
The award in the 'Mathematics' category went to a specialist in large numbers. The prize was awarded to the chairman of the Central Bank of Zimbabwe, Gideon Gono, for his titanic efforts to improve the arithmetic abilities of the population. Under Gono's careful guidance, banknotes in denominations from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars were put into circulation. Unfortunately, Gono himself could not come to the USA for the award ceremony.
The two remaining prizes – in economics and literature – were awarded not to a few individuals, but to very large groups of specialists. The award in the first category went to the directors, managers and auditors of Icelandic banks. They received the Ig Nobel for convincing proof of the possibility of rapidly turning tiny banks into huge ones and vice versa. An additional reason for the award was the application of the newly discovered ability of banks to transform to the economy of an entire country. To the dismay of those present, the laureates did not attend the ceremony.
The literature prize was earned by officers of the Irish police. The law enforcers issued over 50 fines to an offender named Prawo Jazdy. Translated from Polish, this means 'driver's license'.
To emphasize the academic format of the ceremony, the laureates of the Nobel and Ig Nobel prizes in 24 seconds explained to the guests how they did their work and why. At the end of the speech, each speaker summarized his talk in seven words. For example, the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman, formulated the essence of his research as follows: 'the competition of greedy people makes this world go round.' In the context of the Ig Nobel Prize, this can be paraphrased as follows: 'even the strangest research keeps science alive.'