Ig Nobel Awards show: You can't be serious all of the time, or can you?

We can't let a year pass without acknowledging the Ig Nobel Awards, those tongue-in-cheek salutes to dubious achievements in science that first make people laugh, and then think.

The gala awards ceremony takes place every September at Harvard before an audience of 1,100 "splendidly eccentric spectators", where authentic Nobel laureates hand out the prizes — this year's prize was 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars (a 100 trillion dollar Zimbabwean note is worth about 40 cents, so do the math). Here's a look at some of this year's winners.

The anthropology prize went to a multinational European team of researchers for a study at zoos that found that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often, and about as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees. As Tarzan might say: "Cheeta, ungawa!"

A team from Portugal took home the chemistry prize (actually they delivered their acceptance speech via videotape from home) for a study that measured the degree to which human saliva is a good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces. Nothing to spit at.

Another chemistry prize was awarded to German carmaker Volkswagen for "solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the car is being tested".

The medicine award went to a study in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association that observed the beneficial effects of riding roller coasters to hasten the removal of kidney stones.

Co-author Dr. David Wartinger credited the breakthrough to one of his patients, who went to Disney World for spring break and took a ride on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

"He rode the ride, got off, and about two minutes later, passed a kidney stone," Wartinger said, adding that the man got on the ride again and two minutes after he got off a second time he passed another stone.

The medical education award went to a Japanese scientist's paper in Gastrointestinal Endoscopy titled: "Colonoscopy in the Sitting Position: Lessons learned From Self-Colonoscopy."

The Ig Nobel Peace Prize went to a team in Spain that measured "the frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an automobile".

A multinational team of scientists from China, the US, Canada and Singapore got the economics prize for cataloguing the benefits of taking out one's aggression against abusive bosses at the workplace on voodoo dolls rather than the actual supervisor. What's that song from School of Rock — Stick It to the Man?

Co-author of the study, Lindie Liang of Wilfrid Laurier University, said, "I really want to take this opportunity to thank my former boss for teaching me everything about how to deal with abusive bosses."

Another global team — Australia, El Salvador and the UK — found evidence proving that most people who use complicated products and devices do not bother to read the instruction manual. The title of their paper, which appeared in the journal Interacting With Computers, was "Life Is Too Short to RTFM".

The psychology award went to a team that asked 1,000 liars how often they lie and deciding whether or not to believe their answers.

A scientist named James Cole received the nutrition prize for calculating that the caloric intake from human cannibalism is significantly lower than it is from most other traditional meats.

"It turns out that calorifically, we're not that nutritious," Cole said in his acceptance speech.

I stumbled across a candidate for next year's awards on my own. It was done by scientists at no less than Johns Hopkins.

By studying the genome of a certain kind of octopus known for its unfriendliness toward its peers, and then testing how its behavior changes after it's given a dose of the recreational mood-altering street drug known as "Ecstasy", chemical name MDMA, the team "found preliminary evidence of an evolutionary link between the social behaviors of the sea creature and humans, species separated by 500 million years on the evolutionary tree".

The four drugged octopuses gravitated to a cage holding a fifth. "They tended to hug the cage and put their mouth parts on the cage," said Gul Dolen, MD, PhD, and assistant professor of neuroscience at Hopkins. "This is very similar to how humans react to MDMA; they touch each other frequently."

Contact the writer at chrisdavis@chinadailyusa.com.