This year’s spoof Nobel prize awards for “improbable research” were for:
- A chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg.
- Testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds. (This was in the name of Physics and fluid dynamics.)
- Discovering that the word “huh?” seems to exist in every human language. (This means you can react to any of these research topics in any language.)
- An Economics study that offered to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes.
- Experiments that studied the biomedical benefits and consequences of intense kissing. (Does “Duh?” exist in other languages?)
- A biology experiment that observed that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked.
- A researcher who let honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body to figure out which parts are the least and most painful. (He let a bee sting his penis in the name of science.)
View the full list of Improbable Research winners, who may one day be researched on themselves.