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The Ig Nobel Awards hands out prizes for silly science

Did you know that mammals all urinate for roughly the same amount of time – 21 seconds – regardless of their size… give or take 13 seconds? Or that chickens with sticks strapped to their tailfeathers walk like dinosaurs?

Or that a specific spot on a man’s most intimate of areas is the most painful location on a human male body for a honeybee to sting?

Well, now you do thanks to the most recent winners of the Ig Nobel Awards.

Science isn’t all hard numbers and dull research; once a year the Ig Nobel Awards are held to reward scientists for their work in non-traditional fields, and the most recent ceremony handed out ten awards for some rather silly science chosen from a selection of over 9 000 research papers.

The examples above are just three of the ten studies that won prizes for the silly science they represent at the awards, handed out by actual Nobel laureates. The awards were thought up by Improbable Research, a satirical bi-monthly “science humour” magazine that parodies academic journals, and this year marks their 25th anniversary.

If you cracked a smile at any of them and wondered what else science needs to investigate, or even how it goes about deciding what does and doesn’t warrant investigation, the awards achieved their objective: to make people laugh and think.

If you’d like to see the full list of winners (and see a clip of a chicken walking like a dinosaur), you can find it over at mentalfloss.

[Source – Mental Floss]

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