Ig Nobel Awards

You may have noticed on the ScienceNow site a discussion of the recently-awarded Ig Nobel Prizes, a nice complement to the site's coverage of the Nobel Prizes. The former are awards that honor "achievements that first make people LAUGH, and then make them THINK," and they are hysterical. Well, at least to a science geek like myself. At last year's ACUBE meeting, the editor of the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research and founder/host of the Ig Nobel award ceremony, Marc Abrahams, told us about the year's most notable contributions to the magazine. Some of the articles he described discussed things like the pressure produced when penguins pooh, why woodpeckers don't get headaches, the details of an electromechanical teenager repellant, and the levitation of a frog. Though as biologists we read many a scientific article, those in this journal are by far the most amusing.