It’s a science fact: Ig Nobels are the best awards on the planet

For some people, it’s the Oscars. Others love the Tonys or the Video Music Awards. True geeks go for the Webbys and the Shorties. But for me, the awards event of the year has always been the Ig Nobel Prizes. Presented by the Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobels “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

Or, the “I can’t believe somebody actually was granted thousands of dollars to research this stuff and yet, they were” awards.

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Last Thursday, the 23rd annual Ig Nobels ceremony took place at Harvard University. You can watch a Webcast of it here. Here’s the tl;dw version: If you’re going in for heart transplant and you happen to be a mouse, you’d do well to develop a taste for opera. Drinking beer doesn’t really make you more attractive, despite what you may think. If you happen to be rolling a large ball of feces in front of you, it pays to look up once in a while. And if someone offers to make you a bet on a lying cow, don’t take it.

With a song in their hearts

The Ig Nobel for Medicine was awarded to researchers at Teikyo University in Tokyo, who discovered that mice given heart transplants lived 26 days after listening to “La Traviata,” or nearly three weeks longer than mice who listened to nothing at all. Mozart-loving mice lasted an extra 13 days, per the study, but rodents subjected to mystical Gaelic yodeling of Enya perished after 11 days. (Sadly, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” was not included as part of the test bed.)

The best part: The researchers showed up to collect their award dressed as mice.

Beer’s lookin at ya

A study by researchers in the United States, France, and the Netherlands won the Psychology prize for examining “the role of alcohol consumption on self-perceived attractiveness.” Not surprisingly, people who are tipsy think themselves hotter than when they are sober. But that’s not all:

A truly amazing aspect of the findings was that people who only believed they were drunk, but who actually consumed placebo drinks made to taste alcoholic, believed they too were becoming steadily more attractive with each drink — just like their counterparts who really were intoxicated.

The name of that study: “Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.” I really want to find out who funded that one. I have several excellent ideas for follow-on research. With any luck, maybe the Google Glass crew can pitch in as well.

Been there, dung that

Ever wonder how dung beetles navigate on nights when the new moon fails to appear in the sky? Me neither. But apparently researchers in Sweden and South Africa did. They put dung beetles inside a planetarium, removed the moon, and placed them under a simulated African sky where the Milky Way is clearly visible. Sure enough, the beetles rolled their dung in a straighter line when they had the stars to steer by.

But it gets better:

“We also put a cap on them, so they could not see the sky,” said co-author Marcus Byrne, an entomologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. “They get lost until you take the hat off them, and then they find their way. A very simple experiment with very striking results.”

I’ve heard of a dunce cap. But a dung’s cap? That’s a new one.

Please, no tipping

The Ig Nobel award for Probability was awarded to an animal scientist in Scotland, who recorded more than 10,000 bovine “lying episodes” in an effort to predict not only when cows would lie down, but also when they would get back up again. His stirring conclusion:

The longer a cow has been lying down, he found, the more likely it is that the cow will soon stand up. On the other hand, he found, once said cow stands up, you cannot easily predict just when it will lie down again.

Strangely, I’m the exact opposite. Once I lie down, there’s no telling when I’ll get up — especially after intensive beer goggles research.

Other 2013 Ig Nobel winners developed an onion that won’t make you cry when you slice it, discovered how to walk on water (if you happen to be on the moon), examined the best ways to reattach a severed penis (provided it has not already been eaten by a duck), and patented a method for trapping airplane hijackers (drop them through a trap door, snare them inside a bag attached to a parachute, and eject them into the arms of the police waiting on the ground below).

Funny, yes. But also in keeping with the AIR’s larger mission:

We also hope to spur people’s curiosity, and to raise the question: How do you decide what’s important and what’s not, and what’s real and what’s not — in science and everywhere else?

If nothing else, it sounds like it was a heckuva party.

What ridiculous topic do you want to research? Submit your grant applications below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “It’s a science fact: Ig Nobels are the best awards on the planet,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.