Celebrating the Funniest Scientific Studies

Marc Abrahams discusses the annual award ceremony he created, which honors scientific achievements that make people laugh, then think. The Ig Nobels are handed out by genuine Nobel Laureates at a gala ceremony held each autumn at Harvard University and broadcast on the internet and on National Public Radio. Past winners include a veterinary medicine study that showed that cows who have names give more milk than nameless cows, and, in the meteorology category, for the revealing report “Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed.”