At the Sanders Theater at Harvard University, the 29th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony was held - a comic award for the most awkward achievements in various fields of science. During the event, real Nobel laureates awarded their colleagues in ten categories.

According to tradition, the owners of Shnoebelevka, in addition to symbolic awards, received 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, previously withdrawn from circulation due to their constant depreciation.

Therapeutic fast food and "training" of surgeons

In the field of medicine, experts were noted who collected evidence in favor of the fact that only real Italian pizza can protect against cancer and heart attack. The initiator of the work, Italian Silvano Gallus, published three scientific studies about his favorite national dish.

The Schnobel Committee recognized the best signal technology for dog training, which helps train surgeons, as the best technology in medical education. It turned out that the program for developing a conditioned reflex with the help of sound signals can be useful not only for animals, but also for people.

Magnetism of cockroaches, dirty money and diaper change

The international team of biologists received an award for the magnetization and subsequent comparison of dead and living cockroaches. The prize was awarded for a work entitled "Biomagnetic Characteristics of Living American Cockroaches," which showed that a dead cockroach demagnetizes tens of times longer than a living one.

Dutch, Turkish and German scientists became laureates in the field of economics for checking the banknotes of different countries for the presence of microbes. Romanian money was recognized as the most dirty - their composition was the most favorable for the reproduction of bacteria.

An Iranian specialist, Iman Farakhbakhsh, has invented a device that can not only wash the baby, but also replace his old diaper with a new one. For the creation of this unit, similar to a dishwasher, the Iranian received the Shnobel Prize in engineering.

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  • © Roberto Westbrook

Anatomy of a postman and a baby saliva

For work on the anatomy of Shnobelevka French researchers were awarded, who, in the interests of science, recorded the temperature of the scrotum in both dressed and undressed men. Scientists also performed similar measurements with postmen and bus drivers.

Japanese chemists for the first time measured the amount of saliva produced by five-year-old children per day. Scrupulous studies have shown that on average this indicator reaches about 500 ml.

Pleasure and smile

The Shnobel Peace Prize went to a team from the United States, Great Britain, Singapore and Saudi Arabia for measuring the level of pleasure from combing itchy scratches. Also, scientists were able to establish that the intensity of itching on the back and ankles is much higher than on the forearm.

The German psychologist Fritz Strack was awarded a physiology award for what he discovered: holding a pen in his mouth, a man involuntarily smiles, which makes him happier. True, he later established that this was not so.

Wombats and squares

An international team of researchers has received a prize in the field of physical sciences for defining a mechanism that allows Australian marsupial animal wombats to produce square droppings. Two scientists from this team became the owners of Shnobelevka for the second time - four years earlier they had already received this award for calculating the average rate of urination in mammals.

  • Shorthair Wombat
  • © Wikimedia Commons

Recall that, unlike the real Nobel Prize, where the laureates are known long before the awards ceremony, the founders of the Shnobel Prize retain their intrigue until the very end. This is due to the fact that one of the potential winners may consider the award to be offensive. Therefore, the organizers of the ceremony inform participants strictly verbally and enlist their consent to attend the show.

However, the formal criterion for the selection of works - “something that makes you laugh and then think about it”, proposed by the founder of the award, the editor of Annals of Improbable Research magazine Mark Abrams, shows that the ceremony is not just a humorous show. Some of the scientists awarded this award were subsequently able to apply their developments in serious research, and one person, physicist Andrei Game, received the Nobel Prize for his studies of graphene 10 years after he was awarded Shnobelevka for a successful experiment on levitation of a living frog in magnetic field.