Stunning Medical Breakthroughs That You Absolutely Need to Know About

Finally! The results of the 28th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony are here! The Ig Nobels are organized by the Annals of Improbable Research. Their goal: To honor achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think. Since I love to laugh—and I do sometimes think—I’m obsessed with the Ig Nobels. Here are the 10 most recent winners of these exciting awards: 

Lindie Liang, a professor at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University, won the Ig Nobel Economics Prize for investigating whether it’s effective for employees to use Voodoo dolls to retaliate against abusive bosses. Turns out it is.

Reference: Righting a Wrong: Retaliation on a Voodoo Doll Symbolizing an Abusive Supervisor Restores Justice.

Two U.S. doctors—Marc Mitchell and David Wartinger—won the Ig Nobel Medicine Prize for proving that roller coaster rides can be used to speed the passage of kidney stones. They also found that sitting at the back of the roller coaster produced the best results.

Reference: Validation of a Functional Pyelocalyceal Renal Model for the Evaluation of Renal Calculi Passage While Riding a Roller Coaster.

The Ig Nobel Anthropology Prize went to three Swedish researchers who discovered that chimpanzees in zoos imitate humans just as often (and just as well) as humans imitate chimpanzees.

Reference: Spontaneous Cross-Species Imitation in Interaction Between Chimpanzees and Zoo Visitors.

The Ig Nobel Biology Prize went to a long list of German, Swedish and Columbian researchers (and, I’m assuming, wine snots) who were able to prove that wine experts can identify, just by smell, the presence of a single fly in a glass of wine.

Reference: The Scent of the Fly.

Three Portuguese researchers won the Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize for figuring out that human saliva is a great cleaning agent for paintings and historical artifacts.

Reference: Human Saliva as a Cleaning Agent for Dirty Surfaces.

Akira Horiuchi, a Japanese gastroenterologist, won the Ig Nobel Medical Education Prize for giving himself a colonoscopy, while wide awake, sitting upright and being filmed, to prove to patients that this procedure was not to be feared or avoided.

Reference: Colonoscopy in the Sitting Position: Lessons Learned From Self-Colonoscopy by Using a Small-Caliber, Variable-Stiffness Colonoscope.

The Ig Nobel Literature Prize was awarded to four Australian researchers for proving that most people who buy new, hard-to-use products still refuse to read the instruction manual—and that the younger people are, the more likely they are to toss the manuals instead of trying to slog through them.

Reference: Life Is Too Short to RTFM: How Users Relate to Documentation and Excess Features in Consumer Products.

Looking for a new diet? James Cole, a British researcher, won the Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize for calculating that the caloric intake from a human-cannibalism diet is significantly lower than the caloric intake from most other traditional meat diets.

Reference: Assessing the Calorific Significance of Episodes of Human Cannibalism in the Paleolithic.

The Ig Nobel Peace Prize went to Spanish researchers who studied how often (and why) car drivers swear at other drivers, and how cursing while driving impacts road safety.

Reference: Shouting and Cursing While Driving: Frequency, Reasons, Perceived Risk and Punishment.

Two researchers at the Tokyo Women’s Medical College in Japan won the Ig Nobel Reproductive Medicine Prize for showing that wrapping large postage stamps all the way around a man’s penis at bedtime—then checking to see if they’d broken open by morning—was a great way to test whether the man was impotent. 

Reference: Nocturnal Penile Tumescence Monitoring With Stamps.

The 2019 Ig Nobel’s gala ceremony will be held at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tickets will go on sale in July exclusively from the Harvard Box Office. You won’t want to miss it!