The 2005 Ig Nobel Prizes, which honour "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think", have just been presented by a team of Nobel laureates at a US gala ceremony at Harvard University.This one is different from "that" Nobel Prize which generally goes to people who have very powerful forces behind them. So please have some information about this.

Here are links,

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000101&sid=aJy3AqSmBMjQ&refer=japan
http://www.physorg.com/news7048.htmlhttp://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200510/s1476928.htm


Summary from that and other links is here,

This year's Ig Nobel winners include:

PHYSICS: John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 -- in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.

MEDICINE: Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing Neuticles -- artificial replacement testicles for dogs, which are available in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness.

CHEMISTRY: Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin, for conducting a careful experiment to settle the longstanding scientific question: can people swim faster in syrup or in water?

PEACE: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie "Star Wars."

LITERATURE: The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters -- General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others -- each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.

NUTRITION: Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats of Tokyo, Japan, for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (and counting).

FLUID DYNAMICS: Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu , Finland; and Jozsef Gal of Lor?nd E?tv?s University, Hungary, for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report "Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation."

AGRICULTURAL HISTORY: James Watson of Massey University, New Zealand, for his scholarly study, "The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley?s Exploding Trousers."

ECONOMICS ? Gauri Nanda of the MIT, for an alarm clock that runs away and hides. Designed to overcome abuse of the snooze feature on most alarm clocks, Clocky falls to the floor and rolls away on the first push of the snooze button. To turn it off, a person must get out of bed and find it.

BIOLOGY-Stressed frogs that smell like cashew nuts or curry, and a 76-year-long laboratory experiment, have earned Australian scientists Ig Nobel prizes this year.
Associate Professor Mike Tyler's team from the University of Adelaide won the Ig Nobel biology prize for its work on frog smells.Associate Professor Tyler says each frog has a characteristic odour when stressed."Most of the tree frogs have odours which resemble either peanuts or cashew nuts," he said. "It's very sweet."He says another group of frogs have a distinct curry smell."In fact one is a sweet Bombay curry," he says. "And there's another one which is more like one of the north Indian chilli-laden curries."







The Ig Nobel Prizes were handed to the winners by Nobel laureates Dudley Herschbach (1986 Chemistry), William Lipscomb (1976 Chemistry), Robert Wilson (1978 Physics) and Sheldon Glashow (1979 Physics).