2010 Ig Nobel Prizes Awarded

Photo by Alexey Eliseev

The annual international Nobel Prizes are the kinds of awards one can generally only dream of obtaining. Prizes are awarded to brilliant, exceptional individuals in categories like Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Peace, and each award is viewed as the most prestigious in its field. But what about prizes in laughter?

The 2010 Ig Nobel (get it?) Prizes, which were handed out last night, are a slight departure from their namesake awards. According to the website, the Ig Nobel Prizes “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.”

The awards, now in their 20th year, are distributed yearly in a gala ceremony in Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, where the prizes are handed out by Nobel laureates. Last year’s Public Health Prize winner was Dr. Elena Bodnar, pictured. Her invention was a brassiere that could be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks in case of an emergency. This year the winners included the likes of Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, who won the Engineering Prize for perfecting a method to collect whale snot by using a remote-control helicopter. Like they say, laugh first, ask questions later.

The ceremony was webcast live and video will be made available soon.

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