Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and A Liquid?

Among 2017 Ig Nobel prize winners were Marc-Antoine Fardin, who won the Physics Prize, for using fluid dynamics to probe the question “Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?”

And, be honest, haven’t you always wondered why older men have big ears? Wonder no more, because James Heathcote won the Anatomy Prize for his medical research study about this issue.

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people laugh, and then think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative—and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.

Among other winners, Milo Puhan, Alex Suarez, Christian Lo Cascio, Alfred Zahn, Markus Heitz, and Otto Braendli, won the Peace Prize for demonstrating that regular playing of a didgeridoo is an effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea and snoring. In case you didn’t know, a didgeridoo is an Australian Aboriginal wind instrument in the form of a long wooden tube, traditionally made from a hollow branch, which is blown to produce a deep, resonant sound, varied by rhythmic accents of timbre and volume.

The Economics Prize went to Matthew Rockloff and Nancy Greer, for their experiments to see how contact with a live crocodile affects a person’s willingness to gamble. The Fluid Dynamics Prize went to Jiwon Han, for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks backwards while carrying a cup of coffee. The Nutrition Prize went to Fernanda Ito, Enrico Bernard, and Rodrigo Torres, for the first scientific report of human blood in the diet of the hairy-legged vampire bat. The Medicine Prize went to Jean-Pierre Royet, David Meunier, Nicolas Torquet, Anne-Marie Mouly and Tao Jiang, for using advanced brain-scanning technology to measure the extent to which some people are disgusted by cheese. The Cognition Prize went to Matteo Martini, Ilaria Bufalari, Maria Antonietta Stazi, and Salvatore Maria Aglioti, for demonstrating that many identical twins cannot tell themselves apart visually.

There were a couple of other prizes that mentioned body parts that could cause this article to end up filtered by email firewalls.