IG Nobel Prize awards

Check out this year's winners of the Ig Nobel Prize, including (but not limited to):

PUBLIC HEALTH
Jillian Clarke of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, and then Howard University, for investigating the scientific validity of the Five-Second Rule about whether it's safe to eat food that's been dropped on the floor.

ENGINEERING
Donald J. Smith and his father, the late Frank J. Smith, of Orlando Florida, USA, for patenting the combover (U.S. Patent #4,022,227).

and

BIOLOGY
Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden's National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting.

A few days ago, the "IG nobel prize" was awarded by the "Annals of Improbable Research" (not sure what the "IG" stands for).

This year's awards went to (e.g.):
- Research on the speed and pressure involved when penguins poo
- Research on the brain cell activity of locusts when they are shown the movie "star wars"
- The invention of an alarm clock that runs away and hides, thus forcing you to get up and look for it to make it stop ringing
- The prize for literature went to the Nigerian spam mailers going to great length to distribute their "bold and creative short stories" to millions of e-mail readers around the world

Here's the link:

http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2005

Aren't they called "kids"?

IG Nobel is taken from the word ignoble. The rest is left to you to make out what it means. Some 10 years back there was a journal named "Journal of Irreproducible Results". Such kind of research was published in this journal and ignobel was awarded to someone. Anyone's seen this journal recently?

shouldn't the subtext of the thread titel not read "anal improbable research"?

2007 Results are out.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7026150.stm

I like this:

Linguistics - A University of Barcelona team for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards.

Be careful with all those Vanilla ice creams.

I can't tell the difference between a person speaking Dutch backwards and a person speaking Dutch forwards.