'Sex Life Of Rats' Honored At Ig Nobels

You probably heard of the Nobel Prize Awards - which is bestowed in several categories on recognizing academic, cultural, or scientific achievements. However, this high-brow award also needed to get off the high horse, which is why there is such a thing as the Ig Nobel Prize.

According to Reuters, the Ig Nobel spoof awards will be given for the 26th straight year at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts by a group of actual Nobel prize winners, who are said to honor their accomplishments in science and humanities.

The recognized research can be quite unusual. The name, a play on the words of "ignoble" and the Nobel Prize, celebrates the unusual by allowing people to laugh, then think. According to the editor of the Annals of Improbable Research Marc Abrams, unlike most other awards, they find it irrelevant to stand for something as best" or "worse." The Ig Nobel Prize is given out to ten unusual achievements in scientific research, often veiled as criticism or satire. However, as pointed out, it is also used as an example that even absurdity can yield useful bouts of knowledge.

Among the goofiest science awards recognized this year, as noted by Inverse, include "Rats Who Wear Polyester Pants Don't Get Laid As Much" by the late Ahmed Shafik for the Reproduction Prize, "Rocks Have Different Personalities and Personal #Brands" by Mark Avis, Sarah Gorbes, and Shellagh Ferguson for the Economics Prize, and "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit" by Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang, for the Peace Prize.

There had been a lot of other awards that acknowledges the less-than-stellar studies in different fields - for instance, the Darwin Awards is a ceremony that enriches the human gene pool by idiotic self-destruction; the Golden Raspberry Awards that celebrates bad movies and films, and the Pigasus Awards, which goes to exposing paranormal and psychic frauds.