>>14041554Have you looked up what the Ig Nobels actually are? It's not a booby prize, strictly speaking. It's to commemorate some of the more humorous aspects of science, ideally those that also point out or explain something potentially useful. "...celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative, and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology." For example,
>The 2013 winners in Biology/Astronomy: Marie Dacke, Emily Baird, Marcus Byrne, Clarke Scholtz, and Eric Warrant>Discovering that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way.>The 2015 winners in Physiology and Entomology. Awarded jointly to two individuals:>Justin Schmidt, for painstakingly creating the Schmidt sting pain index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects.>Michael L. Smith, for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are the least painful (the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm) and which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft).>The 2018 winners in Anthropology: Tomas Persson, Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc, and Elainie Madsen>Collecting evidence, in a zoo, that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often, and about as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees.Yes, it is sometimes used to take the piss.
>The 2020 winners in Medical Education: Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the United States, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan>Using the COVID-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can. 
