An ice cream flavoured with cow dung extract has this week won its creator a Nobel Prize. Also among this year’s winners was a bottomless bowl of soup, and a study into the side-effects of sword-swallowing…
Now maybe that was a misleading opening. I’m not talking about the Nobel Prize (which is scheduled for December), but rather the lesser known ‘Ig’ Nobel Prize, founded in 1991 at Harvard and presented to a range of winners at the university each year.
The prize recognises genuine achievements from a range of categories (chemistry, physics, engineering, computing etc) whose work has a ’special’ quality but a low chance of being recognised by mainstream awards such as the Nobel Prize.