Watch: The unusual awards presented at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will ‘make you laugh, then think’
The medicine prize was awarded to Italian scientists who studied whether pizza offers protection from death.
The 29th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony was held at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre on September 12. The Ig Nobel Prizes “are intended to celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.”
The annual event is organised by Annals of Improbable Research, a scientific humour magazine. The prizes are handed out by actual Nobel laureates.
The 2019 prize for Chemistry went to Japanese scientists who calculated the amount of saliva a typical five-year-old produces in one day. The engineering prize went to an Iranian inventor for his nappy-changing machine. And the economics prize went to Dutch researchers for their study on the spread of infectious microbes through banknotes, The Guardian reported.