Ig Nobel Prize

Examples range from the discovery that the presence of humans tends to sexually arouse ostriches, to the statement that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements for being the location of Hell, to research on the "five-second rule", a tongue-in-cheek belief that food dropped on the floor will not become contaminated if it is picked up within five seconds.

[7] The prizes are mostly presented by Nobel laureates, originally at a ceremony in a lecture hall at MIT but moved in 1994 to the Sanders Theater at Harvard University for many years.

[12] The event contains a number of running jokes, including Miss Sweetie Poo, a little girl who repeatedly cries out, "Please stop: I'm bored", in a high-pitched voice if speakers go on too long.

For many years Professor Roy J. Glauber swept the stage clean of the airplanes as the official "Keeper of the Broom".

[citation needed] A September 2009 article in The National titled "A noble side to Ig Nobels" says that, although the Ig Nobel Awards are veiled criticism of trivial research, history shows that trivial research sometimes leads to important breakthroughs.

As a direct result of these findings, traps baited with this cheese have been placed in strategic locations to combat the epidemic of malaria in Africa.

[24][25] Andre Geim, before sharing the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research on graphene, shared the Physics Ig Nobel in 2000 with Michael Berry for the magnetic levitation of a frog, which by 2022 was reportedly part of the inspiration for China's lunar gravity research facility.