專門表揚「騎呢」科學研究的搞笑諾貝爾獎，本年度獎項前日揭盅，今屆得獎研究仍然貫徹「乍看令人發笑，但可引人深思」的宗旨，例如意大利科學家加盧斯便憑着透過研究證明，在意大利進食於意大利製作的薄餅，可以有助抗癌，獲頒醫學獎。
今屆頒獎典禮按慣例在哈佛大學舉行，由4名真正諾貝爾獎得主頒獎，得獎者會獲得一張面額100萬億、但實際價值只有3港元的津巴布韋紙幣；每名得主有60秒時間致詞，一旦超時，便會馬上有一名8歲女童在旁邊不停重複「好無聊，請你停下來」。
Cancer-fighting pizza, scrotum study win spoof Nobel prizes
Silvano Gallus of Italy accepts the Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine for the study “Does Pizza Protect Against Cancer?” at the 29th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.Image Credit: Reuters
New York: A study of whether pizza made and eaten in Italy wards off cancer and an inventor of a diaper-changing machine are among the winners of this year’s spoof Nobel prizes.
The awards were due to be handed out on Thursday at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The prizes aim to “celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology,” organizers said of the event, which features a traditional onstage paper airplane toss.
The top honor in the anatomy category went to Roger Mieusset and Bourras Bengoudifa for their 2007 work measuring scrotal temperature asymmetry in naked and clothed postmen in France.
Fritz Strack of the University of W|rzburg won the psychology prize for “discovering that holding a pen in one’s mouth makes one smile, which makes one happier – and for then discovering that it does not.”
The winners receive $10 trillion in cash in essentially worthless, inflation-ravaged Zimbabwean money.
They were allotted 60 seconds to make a speech. If winners over-ran they were going to be cut off by an eight-year-old girl repeating, “Please stop, I’m bored.”
Like every year, the awards were going to be presented by real Nobel laureates, with four attending Thursday’s ceremony.
A Japanese team took home the chemistry prize for estimating the total saliva volume produced per day by a typical five-year-old child.
Iman Farahbakhsh of Iran won the engineering award for his machine that changes babies’ diapers, which was patented in the US last year.
An international team received the anti-Nobel Peace Prize for measuring the pleasurability of scratching an itch while Silvano Gallus took the medicine award for collecting evidence that pizza might protect against illness and death, but only if it is made and consumed in Italy.
Marc Abrahams, editor of “Annals of Improbable Research” magazine, was to close the ceremony by saying: “If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel Prize tonight – and especially if you did – better luck next year.”
