What is an Ig Nobel Prize?

I'm Josh Clark. With me is always Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You sound like you're smiling big as you are. This is stuff you should know. Of course I'm smiling. Yeah, why not. We're in the We're happy chairs, Chuck. Is it like August mid late August? August right mid August. So you know what that means, don't you. It means as hot as hades, and it is. It's gross, man. It keeps, it keeps raining just long enough to soak the ground and then boom the sun comes out and

it's muggy. Yeah, awful. Yeah, it's I actually spoken to people who have lived in New Orleans and they say that it is as bad as New Orleans. He's really yeah, I believe it, Thank you, Al Gore. Stupid global warming, but that's not what you were going to talk about anyway. I just totally sidetracked. You didn't, I yeah, but I went with it. This is my way. So what does August mean? August means that we are to know one month and change away from the ignoble Awards. Right, not

to be confused with the Darwin Awards. No, which, Chuck. How many people sent us when we did that spontaneous human combustion? Sent us that Darwin Award clip of that that Indian man on top of the train, Yeah, getting electrocuted. Yeah, it was very distressing, it is. And only about half of those said be warned what you're about to watch. The others were like, check this out, Kentucky Fried dude. Yeah, normally like I don't like watching people die, but that one,

I don't know. I thought it was kind of interesting, distressing. Sure, So was he a dar Win Award winner? Yeah? I can't remember what four, but he was definitely an award winner. The Darwin Awards are a different deal. Those those people are generally chided for stupidity and the IG Nobel Prize

winners are not made fun of. Plus, the Ignoble Awards actually recognize honest to goodness, genuine scientific research, left of center scientific research a little bit, but scientific research nonetheless. So the Ignoble Awards are coming up. As I said October one, they're actually going to have a live webcast this year, really, yeah, beginning at seven fifteen Eastern Standard time, and I imagine you'll be able to find the webcast or at least a link to it on Improbable research

dot com. Right. Well, NPR every year broadcasts at um the Friday after Thanksgiving. This year it's the day before Thanksgiving, I believe, so we'll look at you. Yeah, but if you don't want to wait and you want to see it live as it happens, yeah, Friday November, the day after Thanksgiving. So what are these, dude? We should go ahead and tell people it's a riff on two things on the Nobel Prize and the word ignoble, which means

of low character or inferior quality. Right, And I have to say that Mark Abrams, the guy who is the editor of Improbable Research, which is a scientific humor magazine. Now it's a website. Um, he kind of does a little fancy footwork here there. What do you mean, well, he says that they're they're not. Yeah, He's like, we're not making fun of people, but we're making fun of people.

But because of the Ignoble Prize, Right, he's saying, like, this is actually the too spark curiosity and science, but we're celebrating research that shouldn't be replicated or reproduced. He's kind of all over the place. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. A little bit he does, and boy, how he does he? Ever, since I think they've done, They've handed out Ignoble prizes for all sorts of stuff, and uh, it's I like it. I think it's fun, sure, and most people do take it lightheartedly.

I have a very famous case that I can go into later on that someone who did not take it very lightheartedly. But it's meant to be very humorous. And if you look at some of the the award winners every year, you can see why. So each year they give a prize out for in ten different categories, right, yes, you let me go through those might as well. Those categories, Josh are nutrition, peace, archaeology, biology, medicine, cognitive science, economics, physics, chemistry,

and literature. And this, like I said, this is uh, this is actually legitimate research. Sometimes they're given out to patent holders, but a lot of times also if you've had a study published in a legitimate journal, you can you're you're you're a candidate. You can be a candidate. I think they get like five thousand nominations every year and they sort through all of them. Right, you can nominate yourself, right, and the study what the study doesn't have to have been done in the year that the

prizes are given out. Yeah. Actually, chuck um back in some researchers UM at right Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. We're working on a project that UM they entitled Harassing, Annoying, and bad guy identifying chemicals, right, and they saw seven point five million dollars for research grants. Is a real deal,

it is. I've actually seen that the documents from the Air Force UM and basically what they were coming up with was a non lethal project of UM, you know chemicals that one of them was her basically a chemical that would they would launch behind enemy lines and it would arouse the ire of uh stinging insects in the area, so they go and attack the the enemy. Another one was to uh create I think chronic or prolonged halitosis among enemy soldiers so they couldn't stand to be around

one another. And then there was the one that got the Ignobell, the infamous gay bomb. Yes, it says that, um, this is under the category I'm sorry category three chemicals chemicals that affect human behavior, so that discipline and morale in enemy units is adversely affected. One distasteful but completely non lethal example would be strong effrodgiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior. So yeah, the the the Air Force was working on a gay bomb. How much

money did they put towards this? Well, hold on it one the two thousand and seven Ignobell Peace Prize, the prize how much money seven point five million, and that don't know, you know what exactly what exactly came of it? And the Air Force didn't take kindly to this, correct, they kind of they did not show up to receive the award, right, I don't think they ever had a statement to the contrary that they were upset, But yeah,

they didn't show up and say hey, thanks. This whole gabon thing didn't work out, but thanks thanks for the props. Who judges these things? Actually, what's crazy is that some Nobel Award winners, like real Nobel Award winners, serve on the Board of Governors to decide who is going to get an ignoble prize? Right Ena, who also has the professor from Gilkins Island? No, yeah, holy Castle Johnson served one year. Apparently they do that. They get celebrities and

certain actors and athletes to be on the panel. And they said regular street Joe's your average Joe off the street. They'll put them on the panel to Yeah. And it's held at Harvard. Yeah, what used to be an m I t announced at Harvard. They have a big ceremony every year. And I think the prize laureates are able to give a one minute acceptance speeches. All yeah. They have little miss Hutie Poo who has to who basically

shouts them off stage when they start exceeding their minute. Uh. And the criteria for little miss cutie Pooh is that she must be an adorable eight year old with ice water in her veins and from the Boston area. And they're actually looking for applicants right now. So yeah, if you're listening in Boston and you're an eight year old terror, yeah, you might want to apply with a shrill voice. Bring it. Yeah. The the award itself, Josh, is different every year, which

is kind of cool. They have different designs each year, and one of them was the was a cereal box labeled Ignoble ohs. And that actually, uh kind of leads as a nice segue into the discussion about this one guy who very famously uh derided the Ignoble Awards as stifling science or at the very least, you know, um, making fun of it, serious scientific, you're not happy about it. No, Bob May, it was. Bob May was the head of the Science Ministry uh in for the UK. So he

was pretty big cheese. I imagine you could put him on par with maybe the Surgeon General or the head of the um uh National Science Foundation here um. And he came out and he wrote a letter to Improbable Research, and he also had one published in Nature where he just railed on the Ignoble organizers and improbable research. He

said not to ever award another one to anyone from England. No, and that was kind of like, hey, thanks the people who were getting the award that year had been doing research. They were from the University of East Anglia, who I have to say is a university that produces some really entertaining studies. Um, but this one was the research into the effects or what makes soggy serial or serial saggy.

That's good research, right, Well, he don't give it to these people, don't ever give it to another British scientist again. And actually he thought, you know he was. He had just put the final stamp of disapproval on it. Actually created this huge outcry in the scientific community about how stuffy the British scientific and certainly not doing very much

to quelle. No, he wasn't. And in two thousand his successor actually went no. Two thousand two actually went to the ig Nobel Awards to basically show that hey, great Britain's you know back on board, baby, Yeah, I think science the more you can um laugh at certain things and have fun with it the better, because you know, you want to turn other people onto science. You don't want to turn them off by thinking that you know, we're also stuffying uptight that we can't laugh at ourselves.

You just gave me yet another segwe speaking of turning people on um. The two thousand Nobel ig Nobel Prize winner for Medicine was a guy named Dr Peck van Andel. Is that a real name, Yes it is, he's Uh. I think he's Dutch. Sounds like a pseudonym. He won the two thousand You you would think it might be. He won the two thousand ig Nobel Prize for Medicine. Uh for making the first m ri I video of human reproductive organs while they're engaged in the act of coitus.

And dude, yeah, if you came, I did, and it is an mri I porner. It's crazy. So basically he had he had two people performing intercourse inside an MRI machine for this, and uh, yeah, he has a video of it and it's up on YouTube. Actually it's an improbable research number one nineteen, I believe. And I should probably say if you are listening, you're watching, you're you're listening to this at work and you're about to open another tab, you might want to take it easy, wait

till you get home. And if you're twelve, don't watch this yet, at least don't tell your parents that it was Josh and Chuck who told you about this? Right? Should we talk about some more of these prizes? Yeah, dude, it's time. I think Robert Lamb, who wrote this awesome piece of work, probably had a lot of fun with this one. He wrote that. Um. In two thousand three, Keys W. Mulliker did a study on the existence of

homosexual necrophiliac ducks. And this is all real. Yeah it actually the study led to dead duck Day in the Netherlands. Now really, well, it's funny you should say the Netherlands, because there was one in New Zealand about exploding pants among New Zealand farmers in the nine thirties. Someone studied that too. Yeah, what was up with that? I have no idea. I didn't I didn't see the final outcome. I I went on the improbable research and found some

other winner's chuck. Um. There's some pretty wacky stuff out there. At the very least, I mean, you have to think about it. When somebody undertakes this this a study, they're very serious about it. They want to get to the bottom of it. And obviously if you look at it like the gay bomb, they didn't say the gay bomb. Plus, you know, arousing steam bees and there's legitimate research associated

with it's the gay bomb. They're picking out the funniest angle of looking at this, but there is some legitimate There is very much legitimate research put into this, and you have to imagine it's funding for this research. Somebody said Okay, yeah, go check out necrophiliac homosexual ducks and then it's published. Yeah, usually in a medical journal. I have one from last year that was pretty funny in

the field of chemistry. Um Sherry and Pierre Joseph Hill and Deborah Anderson discovered that coca cola is an effective spermicide and see why Hong c c she pe Wu and b and Chiang accidentally proved that it is not an effective spermacide in the same year. So they were both award the award for chemistry, which I thought was pretty funny, and they all showed up to receive it. Yeah, both sides of the studies. Um. I think it was last year, Chuck that uh Ivan are Schwab and Philip

are A may Um won the prize for ornithology. What was that they researched Why woodpeckers don't get headaches really or why they give people headaches is what I would follow up with No, uh, last year and nutrition. This one I thought was pretty funny. Brian Wantsink investigated people's appetite for mindless eating, and his trick was he had a self refilling bowl of soup in front of them

that they didn't realize was constantly refilling itself. He would study if they would just keep on eating and eating without thinking about it. Awesome. I could go for a self refilling bowl of soup. Really yeah, depending on the soup loaded baked potato definitely. Um, I've got one. You're ready. Yeah. The Ignoble Prize for Mathematics in a two thousand in seven UM went to nick's Vence Venson and Piers Barnes

of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization. They calculated the number of photographs you have to take to ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed. Do you have the stat No? I don't, But if you want the stat you can read the June two thousand and six issue of Velocity and the articles called blink free Photos Guaranteed. I've got one for you too.

We could do this all day, we could, but this one is actually could be real have real applications in aviation. They discovered that hamsters recover from jet lag more quickly when given viagra, So there might be something to that jet lags, you know, a problem for some people, and maybe something in the viagra could actually help humans because rats and hamsters and humans all kind of are wired

the same. Well. I don't know if it's groundbaracking research as much as it is, you know, just proving conventional wisdom. You know, Well, do you think so with viagra? Everybody knows viagra? Here's jet lagging rodents? Okay, sorry, you got another one? I do? Can you tell by the look on my face? Yeah, you were gasping. Two thousand and seven, the Medicine Prize went to some researchers from the University of Tennessee College of Medicine. They did some research into

terminating hiccups by digital rectal massage and digital in this case. Okay, yeah, I was out. You know, that's funny. I read that earlier. I was like, how can you get a digital rectal massage? I was thinking digitizing, all right, I wasn't thinking fingers. That makes sense. Do you got any more you want to do another couple. Actually there was one what the guy who studied strippers and found that strippers get more tips when they're ovulating. Yeah, they won the Economics Prize

last year. I thought that was pretty pretty interesting. So in essence, it's a lot of fun. You know, they're they're kind of poking fun, but it is some legitimate research going on, and I just think it's a good time. I agree. And if you're interested in checking it out out, as I said, the ig Noo Bell Prizes are gonna be on there's gonna be a live webcast at seven fifteen Eastern on October one if you want to find out who ends up being miss Cutie Poo for two

thousand nine in a wig, eight year old, steely cold. Yeah, yeah, I could hear it. Yeah, so Chuck. I guess that's it right. If you want to read this, I have to say, you said, Robert Lamb wrote a great article. I agreed. I think this article has one of the best introductions on the site. It's a good one. You can find that by typing in EIGG and then space and Nobel on the handy search bar on how stuff works dot com. And since I said that, that means

my friends that it is time for listener may all. Yes, indeed, Josh, I'm just gonna call this answer to our query about the biggest badass of World War two. Yes, Chuck, I'm very excited about this one. We got a lot of respond section. We called it, if you remember correctly, just to recap, we did a thing on jaff any stragglers. Wait, let's go to the way back machine and listen to what we said in contrast to u COI was the

baddest dude in World War two. Probably as a matter of fact, I invite our listeners to email us by anybody who can who want, any single individual who can top the man we're about to talk about as in badness. Okay, I agree, and Josh will personally email you back and debate you. And there it is. So. We we posited the Onada was one of the biggest uh rambos of the war, and we challenge people sendance went bad and people did. Yeah, we got a lot of responses. Yeah,

but there was one that had overwhelming uh support. There was there are actually a couple we want to give a special uh uh. I guess you would call it a runner up to Audie Murphy. Yeah, famous American actor and soldier. Yeah, baby face like a buck. But yeah, I started shooting at him. He went crazy and he was awesome and he was super bad. But I think he gets a little attention because he was a real small guy and he was American, and he was American.

He had like such a chairb base like people think, wow, man, he's extra bad because he was tough and he's a little We got some boats. There was some British guy that was pretty bad. Another couple of Japanese dudes. But wait what you got another one? But we have a winner, Yes, clear winner. This guy is so bad. This is uh semo hia Hija. The nickname for him was white Death. Yes.

Can I tell this guy's story please? All right? So he was a Finnish farmer and he um was just basically doing his own thing when the Russians invaded Finland the Winter War. Yes, he didn't like this one bit. So basically he took a standard bolt action rifle without a sight. Yeah, no no head site, no scope, no scope sorry yeah uh and went out into the woods, the sub arctic woods of Finland, where it gets to about forty degrees below fahrenheight and just basically sat up

in trees or in blinds and waited. And he didn't have to wait very long. Over the course of one year, just using this old rifle, he killed five hundred Russians, five hundred and five as a sniper. As a sniper, a lot of these people. When the Russians were finally alerted that there was one sniper out there there was causing them all these problems, they sent detachments with the specific mission of going to kill him. Find the White Death. Yeah,

that's when he got the name the White Death. So they send, they send detachment after detachment out and he just murders every single one of them too. He killed two hundred people with a submachine gun, so that would, I guess would be like the close up fight. So seven hundred and five seven five confirmed kills in a year. Finally somebody gets close enough to him to shoot him in the face with an explode name pullet, and it still didn't kill him. Yep, he was shot in the jaw.

Rumor has it that he shot the other sniper before losing consciousness, So the guy that just shot him before he passed out, he killed him immediate retribution. And the guy who wrote in with the best email says, unofficially he had over eight hundred kills and this was an under one hundred days. It was less than a year. Wow. So he said it was just a killing machine. Think about it. That is at least five kills per day plus two hundred kills with the World War two submachine gun.

And he still didn't die. You know, he lost consciousness and woke up apparently the day World War two ended. Yeah, and he lived until So I think the White Death I'm gonna vote for him. Oh, hands down. He is the biggest badass of World War Two. Yeah, although some people are going to write in and say, yeah, but this was sniper stuff and Autie Murphy fought people with like a knife. And I gotta tell you, Autie Murphy

is to me a very close second. But the White Death, first of all, alone forty degree, he's below fahrenheight just sitting out there sniping Russians. I mean, I think he's I think he wins the award in my opinion. He does. So I want to give credit where credit is due here. We want to thank carson Um from Toronto. Actually it's a joke. I'm making a joke. He's actually from Edmonton and he said please don't say him from Toronto. And he also said something about eating heaven euros and mentioning

that so his friends would know it's really him. Okay, so Carson, we've done so. So Carson from Edmonton, Timman in New York City, Devon from Georgia, and Adrian all wrote in with White Death and I think they're actually more stuff I left you off. Yeah, I know they're definitely, don't snipe me. And also there's a really cool uh article craft dot com about Rambo or basically actual life soldiers who Rambo looked like something or other. Yeah, um,

that was worth reading. And if you want to send us an email about anything at all, White Death or otherwise, you can send that to stuff pod cats at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page. Hey, if you're a fan of altoids the curiously strong Mints, you probably have a lot of empty tins laying around. You can

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