‘Attractive drunk’ idea scoops Ig Nobel award

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.

This is the 23rd year for the award, sponsored by the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research and given out to honour 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 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Editor Marc Abrahams, who organised the ceremony, says 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 dollars — but in Zimbabwe dollars ...around €3.

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, Britain and Germany.

Other winners included Brian Crandall of the US and Peter Stahl of Canada and the US, who par-boiled a dead shrew, then swallowed it without chewing so they could examine their excrement to see which bones would dissolve in the human digestive system.

Notably absent was the winner of this year’s Ig Nobel Peace Prize, Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko, who declared it illegal to applaud in public. He shares the prize with the Belarus State Police, who arrested a one-armed man for clapping.