THE 2021 IGNOBEL PRIZES

Here are the winners of the 2021 IgNobel Prizes, awarded to the most dubious research of the year.
– Biology Prize: Susanne Schötz, a researcher at Lund University in Sweden, for recording and analyzing the vocalization of housecats. Schötz has found that a combined murmur and meow is the most common cat sound, while watching birds through a window will elicit chatters and chirps. Meows for food will have a rising contour to the pitch, while discontented cat meows will have a falling pitch.
– Ecology Prize: Researchers from the University of Valencia in Spain used genetic analysis to identify the different species of bacteria in wads of discarded chewing gum stuck on pavements in various countries.
– Chemistry Prize: A team of German scientists chemically analyzed the air inside movie theaters, to test whether the odors produced by an audience reliably indicate the levels of violence, sex, antisocial behavior, drug use, and bad language in the movie the audience is watching.
– Transportation Prize: A team from Cornel University experimented to determine whether it is safer to transport an airborne rhinoceros upside-down. Their study involved 12 sedated rhinos. Six were placed first in a horizontal position before being suspended by their feet, while six others had the order of the two positions reversed. The results: inconclusive.
– Economics Prize: To Pavlo Blavatskyy, from the Montpellier Business School in France, for discovering that the obesity of a country’s politicians may be a good indicator of that country’s corruption.
– Medicine Prize: Awarded to some researchers for demonstrating that sexual orgasms can be as effective as decongestant medicines at improving nasal breathing.
– Peace Prize: Given to a research team for testing the hypothesis that humans evolved beards to protect themselves from punches to the face.
– Physics Prize: Awarded to a team of physicists for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not constantly collide with other pedestrians.
– Kinetics Prize: Awarded to a Japanese team for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do sometimes collide with other pedestrians.
– Entomology Prize: Given to scientists for their research study ‘A New Method of Cockroach Control on Submarines.’
* I know these all sound stupid, but there’s a reason behind every one of these projects. And that reason is really stupid.
* The IgNobel Prize, also known as the annual “We’ve Got To Protect Our Phony Baloney Jobs, Gentlemen” Awards.
* Great. Another year gone, and I still don’t know how to transport an airborne rhinoceros.
* Odors produced by an audience in a movie theater. Except that it’s usually the movie that stinks.
* This is like a middle school Science Fair, only instead of spending about 12 bucks on their project they spent millions.