Voodoo doll and cannibalism studies triumph at Ig Nobels

[muriel_volestrangler]

The awards included a medicine prize for urologists in Michigan who showed that kidney stones could be passed more swiftly by riding on a rollercoaster at a Disney theme park; a nutrition prize for work that revealed the unimpressive nutritional value of a cannibalistic diet; and a literature prize for a study titled “Life is too short to RTFM” that demonstrated how people despair of instruction manuals.

Lindie Liang and fellow psychologists at the University of Waterloo in Ontario won the economics prize for the voodoo doll investigation. Curious as to why people retaliate against bosses who could have them fired, the team showed that what mattered to slighted employees was a sense that justice had been served.
...
Other recipients included Swedish philosophers who discovered through observations at the local zoo that chimpanzees imitate humans as much as humans imitate chimps; biologists who found that professional wine tasters can detect the presence of a single fly in a glass of wine; and doctors in Oregon who, after 18 months of trial and error, hit upon rings of postage stamps to determine whether men had erections while they slept at night.

The ceremony also handed out prizes to Portuguese chemists for discerning the cleaning properties of human saliva and Japanese colonoscopists who found that the procedure can be performed solo provided you sit in the right position.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/14/voodoo-doll-and-cannibalism-studies-triumph-at-ig-nobels

[Cirque du So-What]

1. Science!

Actually, one of those has intrinsic value - the postage stamps 'round the pecker trick. I remember hearing about that method at least ten years ago.