THIS YEAR’S IGNOBLE PRIZES

This year’s Ig Nobel prizes were handed our last Thursday. The award honors humorous and/or dubious scientific achievement. The winners:
– A Cornell University graduate student who allowed honeybees to sting him in 25 places to determine which place was the most painful. The conclusion: the nostril, the upper lip and the penis.
– A group of scientists who concluded it’s possible for Moroccan Emperor Moulay Ismael to have sired 888 children, as is claimed. Ismael fathered the children during a roughly 30-year reign that ended in 1727. Yes, it is possible to father that many children if he had sex daily. The study found that it could be done with as few as 65 women.
– A trio of linguists who discovered that almost every language in the world uses the word “huh” in conversation.
– Researchers who found that corporate CEOs take less professional risk if they had been affected by natural disasters as children. For example, late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who lived through a deadly landslide near his home in San Francisco as a child, ran the company conservatively. His successor, Tim Cook, witnessed few fatalities despite regular tornadoes while growing up in Alabama and has made more risky business decisions.
– David Hu, for his research on the principle that all mammals empty their bladders of urine in about 21 seconds.
– A team of scientists invented a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg.
– A team from Chile, for observing that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked.
– A team of scientists from the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand for determining that acute appendicitis can be accurately diagnosed by the amount of pain evident when the patient is driven over speed bumps.
* That bee guy’s getting his own superhero movie, I hear.
* Look, if you’re letting bees sting your penis, you might have other issues besides you graduate program.
* So – he didn’t try the tip of the tongue, eh? Wuss!
* I give his study a “B”.
* The one about whether a guy could have 888 children? That took about 40 seconds on a calculator.
* There’s an international team of scientists for the speed bump one? Sure, how could one country ever grasp a subject this huge?
* I like the one studying how long it takes mammals to urinate. Finally a study that literally pisses the grant money away.
* It’s not these obvious ones that cause all the problems. It’s the mid-range studies that are just as stupid but sound true.
* In fact, I’d like some grant money to study just how bad a problem this is.