And The Winners Are: 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes

Every year I wait for the announcement of the winners of the Ig Nobel Prizes, the annual award given by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine to oddball but often surprisingly practical scientific achievements.

They always make me laugh, this years winners did not disappoint. Check them out at the link above.

The Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize, for example, was awarded to two teams of doctors—one team discovered that Coke is an effective spermicide; the other team discovered that it is not. The team that found that Coke is an effective spermicide said that Diet Coke even works better, but that more research was needed to figure out why. Their study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1985.

Geoffrey Miller won an award for studying the earning potential of exotic dancers. Miller, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, wanted to examine prior studies that found women are more attractive to men when at peak fertility. So he and his colleagues took the work one step further — by studying earnings of exotic dancers.

He studied 18 subjects and found that the average earnings were $250 for a five-hour shift. It increased to $350 to $400 per five-hour shift when the women were their most fertile, he said. That is a 40 to 60 percent increase, enough to cause strippers to start scheduling their lap dances.