The 2022 Heinz Oberhummer award, for “outstanding science communication”, was awarded to the Ig Nobel Prize on November 24, at the Stadtsaal in Vienna, Austria. The ceremony was webcast. Here’s recorded video of it:
Tag: prize
Nobel Prize winners live (a bit) longer [study]
“We attempt to measure the impact of winning a Nobel Prize on longevity by comparing winners to a control group, namely, those scientists nominated for a Nobel Prize who were never successful.” The 2007 study was performed by Professor Andrew Oswald [pictured] of the Department of Economics, The University of Warwick, UK, and Dr Matthew […]
Huh? Ig Nobel Prize winner wins Heineken Young Scientist Award
Mark Dingemanse was awarded the Heineken Young Scientists Award in Humanities 2020. The official announcement says: Mark Dingemanse studied African languages and cultures at Leiden University. He carried out research for his PhD in Ghana, receiving his doctorate cum laude in 2011 at Radboud University Nijmegen. That work contributed to a fundamental shift in research […]
Banana skins and rabbit cartilage mucus – with an Ig Nobel connection
Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, were jointly awarded the 2014 Ig Nobel Physics Prize for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that’s on the floor. REFERENCE: “Frictional Coefficient under […]
Predicting a Scientist’s Future Achievement Is Unpredictable?
The drive to measure—in advance!—success gets a whack in the computational knee, in this study about an Ig Nobel Prize (and also Nobel Prize) winner’s career: “Web of Science: Showing a Bug Today That Can Mislead Scientific Research Output’s Prediction,” Pablo Diniz Batista, Igor Marques-Carneiro, Leduc Hermeto de Almeida Fauth, and Marcia de Oliveira Reis […]
Ig Nobel Prize-winning swearing research wins best science book prize
Black Sheep: The Hidden Benefits of Being Bad, a new book by Richard Stephens, is the British Psychological Society’s Book Award winner — in the category Popular Science. The BPS’s Book Awards have just been announced. In the year 2010, Richard Stephens and two colleagues were awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing […]
A knighthood for Geim—he of frogs, magnets & pencils
The man [pictured here] who was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for using magnets to levitate a frog (a feat he accomplished together with a man who already had a knighthood) and then ten years later was awarded a Nobel Prize for having used scotch tape to tease graphene layers from a pencil, has now been […]
Risk-taking Ig Nobel winner sponsors a prize for risk
Lloyds of London, is sponsoring a prize for “the science of risk”. The Lloyds web site says: The Science of Risk Prize Information Booklet 2011 can be found here. The 1992 Ig Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to “the investors of Lloyds of London, heirs to 300 years of dull prudent management, for their bold attempt to insure […]
Invention priority? Hurtubise, Brown, and their arms
“I learned the hard way that there’s no bear spray that will stop a bear.” So says Troy Hurtubise in this old video (below) where he demonstrates some of his advanced technology. Today comes word that a man named David Brown was awarded a 2011 Invention Award for his crime-fighting armored glove. At a glance, […]
Little girls at prize ceremonies: Contrasts
Euronews reports that a brand-newly created prize, the Confucius Prize, was hastily awarded this week at a ceremony in Beijing, possibly by the Chinese government, possibly not. Euronews says that the winner says he was unaware he was winning something, and thus did not appear at the ceremony. And so, says the report, the prize […]