Science On Top

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Peter Miller, Ross Balch. The Ig Nobel Prizes honour achievements that first make us laugh, then make us think. We take a look at this year’s winners: from rollercoaster medicine to Voodoo in the workplace! You can watch the award ceremony here. 00:03:13 MEDICINE PRIZE went to two Americans, Marc Mitchell and David Wartinger, for using roller coaster rides to try to hasten the passage of kidney stones. 00:09:41 ANTHROPOLOGY PRIZE went to an international team for collecting evidence, in a zoo, that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often, and about as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees. 00:15:14 BIOLOGY PRIZE was awarded to an international team of eight scientists for demonstrating that wine experts can reliably identify, by smell, the presence of a single fly in a glass of wine. 00:21:07 CHEMISTRY PRIZE was given to three researchers from Portugal for measuring the degree to which human saliva is a good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces. 00:25:04 MEDICAL EDUCATION PRIZE