Friday, November 27th, 2009

2009 Ig Nobel Prizes

Benoit Mandelbrot and eight Nobel laureates (Rich Roberts, Wolfgang Ketterle, Dudley Herschbach, Paul Krugman, Roy Glauber, Frank Wilczek, William Lipscomb and Martin Chalfie) pull a sword from the throat of 2007 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize winner Dan Meyer. Photo: Alexey Eliseev.

It's the day after Thanksgiving, and that definitely means two things: leftovers, and ridiculously crowded shopping malls. But faithful Science Friday listeners know that it's also time for our annual broadcast of the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, recognizing the strange, silly, and stupid in the world of science. Ten Ig Nobel awards were given out this year in early October by the editors of the science humor magazine the Annals of Improbable Research. Join Ira Flatow in this hour of Science Friday for our post-Thanksgiving selection of highlights from the 19th First Annual awards ceremony -- including research that investigated whether it's better to be hit over the head with a full or empty bottle of beer, whether cows with names are better milk producers than cows without names, and whether it is possible to create diamonds from tequila.