Accounts of this year’s Ig Nobel ceremony can be discerned here and there, respectively, in the glimmering vastness of groans and bleatings in the world’s press and blogs.
Category: Ig Nobel
News about the Ig Nobel Prizes — honoring achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.
The man who performed 10,000 root canals
The man who performed more than 10,000 root canal procedures — and who once thrilled the audence at an Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony — has died. An obituary appears in the October 7, 2005 issue of the Boston Globe. It reads in part: Dr. Philip Joseph Molloy III was an endodontist with a blue-collar work […]
Rumor is untrue
This morning, the morning after the Ig Nobel ceremony, reports about the event and the winners were the sixth-most-mailed news items on both Yahoo ("The Winner Is… Fake Dog Testicle Creator") and CNN ("Pooch Neuticles top Ig Nobels"). However… We have been inundated with email asking whether an Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to the […]
The new Ig Nobel Prize winners
The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize winners were revealed last night in a gala ceremony at Harvard.
Ig Nobel tonight!
Tonight the new Ig Nobel Prize winners will be revealed at the Fifteenth 1st Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. The LIVE Webcast begins at 7:15 pm Boston time, with a 15-minute pre-concert (The world premiere of "Infinite Chopsticks" performed by the composer, Nicholas Carstoiu) The ceremony proper begins at 7:30 pm, and should be approx […]
Glauber’s sweeping success
Congratulations to Ig Nobel sweeper Roy Glauber [click on the link to see an action photo], who has just won a Nobel Prize in physics! For the past ten years, Roy has been a vital participant in the annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. By spontaneous tradition, the Ig audience throws paper airplanes at the stage […]
Dogged success for Ig winner
The Spanish automatic dog-washing machine that was honored with the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize (in the field of hygiene) is now enjoying great success in America, according to a May 13, 2005 news report from the Associated Press: Dog washing machine has pooches in a spin–Contraption provides hands-free, wash and dry cycles– A washing machine […]
Hoagland’s further bold exploration
There is news about Richard Hoagland, the man who won the 1997 Ig Nobel Astronomy Prize "for identifying artificial features on the moon and on Mars, including a human face on Mars and ten-mile high buildings on the far side of the moon." [For details of that work, see the book The Monuments of Mars […]
…and unaware
A memorable, all-too-entertaining report in the September 28, 2000 issue of the Washington Post elaborates on our earlier observation that sometimes the Ig Nobel Prizes can bring clarity to puzzling events in the news. Here’s a characteristic snippet: Rep. Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican, called Brown’s account of events "feeble," "clueless," "shocking" and "beyond belief." […]
Ig book publication day (and Troy)
Today is the official publication day for our new book The Ig Nobel Prizes 2: An All-New Collection of the World’s Unlikeliest Research (ISBN 0525949127). Please spread the word! This book tells the stories, in glorious and inglorious detail, of a completely different heap of Ig Nobel Prize winners than appear in the book The […]