Ig®Nobel Prizes for 2008 Awarded

The Ig®Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday. As the organizing body, the Annals of Improbable Research noted, “In a gala ceremony in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, 1200 splendidly eccentric spectators watch[ed] the winners step forward to accept their Prizes. These [were] physically handed out by genuinely bemused genuine Nobel Laureates.” The favorite here was in archaeology, wherein the winning study proved that the effects of a live armadillo can change the course of history by moving stuff around.

Astolfo Gomes de Mello Araujo, a professor of archaeology at the Universidade De Sao Paulo in Brazil and his colleague, José Carlos Marcelino, won the archaeology award. The Associated Press said, “Pesky armadillos, they found, can move artifacts in archaeological dig sites up, down and even laterally by several meters as they dig. Armadillos are burrowing mammals and prolific diggers. Their abodes can range from emergency burrows 20 inches deep, to more permanent homes reaching 20 feet deep, with networks of tunnels and multiple entrances, according to the Humane Society of the United States' Web site.” That means that one armadillo could alter human understanding of history by shifting Roman artifacts, for example, to pre-Roman parts of the soil.

Professor Araujo was very pleased with the parody award. In an e-mail he told the AP, “There is no Nobel Prize for archaeology, so an Ig Nobel is a good thing.”

Deborah Anderson a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University's School of Medicine, had a sense of humor about hers as well. She and her study team found that Coca-Cola acts as a spermicide, and Diet Coke works even better. “We're thrilled to win an Ig Nobel, because the study was somewhat of a parody in the first place.” The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1985.

And then, there is Geoffrey Miller, associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico. He discovered that lap dancers make more money at the peak of their monthly cycle. The AP reports, “In the 18 subjects Miller studied, average earnings were $250 for a five-hour shift. That jumped to $350 to $400 per five-hour shift when the women were their most fertile, he said. ‘I have heard, anecdotally, that some lap dancers have scheduled shifts based on this research,’ he said.” Science is a wonderful thing.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Kensington Review Home