the Ig Nobel Prizes !

Every Ig Nobel Prize winner has done something that first makes people LAUGH, then makes them THINK. The Igs are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology. The Igs are inflicted on you by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR).


The 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Winners


The 2004 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday evening, September 30, at the 14th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

MEDICINE Steven Stack of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA and James Gundlach of Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA, for their published report "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide."

PUBLIC HEALTHJillian Clarke of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, and then Howard University, for investigating the scientific validity of the Five-Second Rule about whether it's safe to eat food that's been dropped on the floor.

LITERATUREThe American Nudist Research Library of Kissimmee, Florida, USA, for preserving nudist history so that everyone can see it.

PSYCHOLOGY Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else -- even a woman in a gorilla suit.REFERENCE: "Gorillas in Our Midst,"

ECONOMICS The Vatican, for outsourcing prayers to India.

PEACEDaisuke Inoue of Hyogo, Japan, for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.

So, hows that?