11 October 2012
- Nobel Prize laureates Eric Maskin, Rich Roberts and Dudley Herschbach lean over behind a mini Eiffel Tower during a performance at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
It’s the Nobel Prize season, with daily announcements coming from Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden of this year’s recipients of the prestigious awards. Late in September the Ig Noble Prizes for “improbable research that makes people laugh and then think” were announced in a ceremony at Harvard University. This year’s recipients include Dutch researchers who won the psychology prize for studying why leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower look smaller; four Americans who took the neuroscience prize for demonstrating that sophisticated equipment can detect brain activity in dead fish; and a British-American team that won the physics prize for explaining how and why ponytails bounce. This year’s literature prize was awarded to the US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.