Ig Nobel prize honours peeing, chicken dinosaurs and eggs (pictures)

Not all science awards are staid: Every year, the Improbable Research group from HarvardUniversity hosts the Ig Nobel Prize. While this is a play on the Nobel Prize and the word"ignoble," meaning not honorable in character or purpose, nominees have nothing to be ashamed of. The aim of the Ig Nobel prize is to honour achievements that"make people laugh," and then think, "to celebrate the use ofimagination in science."

Click through the gallery for the winners, or visit YouTube to watch a video of the ceremony. You can also check out our gallery of last year's winners here.

Once an egg is cooked, that's it. There's no restoring it toits unboiled state, at least not perfectly.

There are, however, ways to pullapart the proteins that get tangled in the boiling process, allowing them torefold into a liquid state. Earlier this year, an international team of researchers revealed their method for doing so.

Half of this battle is using an organic compound calledurea, which dissolves the proteins. The other half, for which professor ColinRaston from Flinders University and an international team were awarded the IgNobel Chemistry Prize, is using a high-speed fluid vortex machine, which forces the amino acids back intotheir untangled state by means of shear stress.

This isn't just for fun. The process is a means wherebyresearchers can reclaim denatured proteins in the lab, which would allow, for example,cancer medications to be manufactured much more cheaply. You can read the full paper here.

A bigger bladder will take longer to empty, right? Apparentlynot! According to a team of researchers from the Georgia Institute ofTechnology, all mammals take roughly the same amount of time to pee: an averageof 21 seconds, with a standard deviation of 13 seconds. The team has calledthis the "Law of Urination."

"This feat is made possible by larger animals havinglonger urethras, thus higher gravitational force and flow speed," the paper's abstract reads."Smaller mammals are challenged during urination due to high viscous andsurface tension forces that limit their urine to single drops. Our findingsreveal the urethra constitutes as a flow enhancing device, enabling the urinarysystem to be scaled up without compromising its function."

Why is this information valuable? Well, it couldhelp in diagnosing urinary problems. It could also be used to design scalable hydrodynamicsystems inspired by nature.

Linguistic differences are fascinating, but linguisticsimilarities can be even more so. The word "Huh?", used asa means of indicating that the listener has not understood a speaker, is universal,found in languages around the world in almost identical form.

Moreover, it's not an instinctive utterance, as explained in a paper lead authored by Mark Dingemanse of the Max Planck Institute forPsycholinguistics in The Netherlands. The paper makes the case for Huh'sposition as a word. It has to be learned from others.

While the wordis universal, the reason why is still unclear.

Taking risks can pay off, but not everyone is comfortabledoing so. Among business leaders, it can be a desirable trait, but where doesit come from?

A team of researchers from around the globe -- Gennaro Bernile ofSingapore Management University, Vineet Bhagwat of the University of Oregon andP Raghavendra Rau of the University of Cambridge -- draw a direct line betweenrisk-taking management and disasters in childhood.

According to the paper, CEOs who witness fatal disaster situations in childhood behave in different ways, depending on how the disaster affectedthem personally. Those who saw no significant negative personal consequencestake more risks, whereas CEOs who did experiencenegative personal consequences tend to play things more safely.

"These patterns manifest across various corporatepolicies including financial leverage, cash holdings, and acquisitionactivity," the abstract reads. "Ultimately, the link between CEOs'disaster experience and corporate policies has real economic consequences onfirm riskiness and cost of capital."

How do you stop police officers from taking cash bribes? By bribingthem not to, apparently. This year's Ig Nobel Economics Prize goes to theBangkok Metropolitan Police, for its short-lived anti-bribe incentive program. A bonus would be given to officers who arrested traffic violators who offeredbribes.

The incentive program collapsed under the weight of criticism from the public after just a few days.

Sure, kissing is great, but what does it actually do foryou? According to two different teams of researchers, jointly awarded the IgNobel Medicine Prize, actually a fair bit.

Hajime Kimata, who runs the Department of Allergy at SatouHospital in Osaka, Japan, found that kissing can reduce allergic response. Morespecifically, he studied people who were allergic to cedar pollen and dustmites, and found that 30 minutes of kissing reduced the skin weal response to allergens, and the production of allergen-specific immunoglobulin-E. Taking the research further, he also found that sexual intercourse can reduce the skin weal response to allergens.

The other team, led by Natália Kamodyová of ComeniusUniversity in Bratislava, Slovakia, found that, for a short window afterkissing, male DNA can be found in female saliva samples (and presumably vice versa) and can be isolated after promptcollection. This could be used in forensic DNA testing.

Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif, aka Moulay Ismail theBloodthirsty, ruled Morocco as emperor from 1672 to 1727. Legend has it that,during the latter half of his reign, from 1697 to 1727 (the year of his deathat the age of 80), he fathered 888 children.

We will likely never know the truth of this claim, but we doknow that it is, in fact, mathematically possible, thanks to the efforts of Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer of the Universityof Vienna in Austria. The pair ran mathematical simulations to determinewhether, with 500 concubines and four wives, Moulay Ismail could have conceivedthe maximum number of children he is said to have sired, some 1,171, including600 sons.

Taking ovulation cycles and fertility into account, it ispossible that Moulay Ismail could have sired that many children, with a maximumof 2.3 copulations per day over the 32-year period, and, moreover, would onlyhave needed a harem of 65 to 110 women to have done so.

When it comes to studying theropod movement, birds are thebest living creatures to act as a stand-in. That said, they're not perfect. They're a lot smaller, their centre of gravity is positioned differently, andthey move their legs differently compared to how scientists suppose dinosaurs move. Tosolve this problem, a team of researchers from the University of Chile and theUniversity of Illinois found a novel solution: attaching a plunger-like tail to a chicken's butt.

This shifts the chicken's centre of gravity back farther onits body, which in turn shifts limb posture and gait closer towards the inferredlimb posture and gait of bipedal theropod dinosaurs.

"Chickens raised wearing artificial tails, andconsequently with more posteriorly located centre of mass, showed a morevertical orientation of the femur during standing and increased femoraldisplacement during locomotion," the paper's abstract reads. "Our results support the hypothesis that gradualchanges in the location of the centre of mass resulted in more crouchedhindlimb postures and a shift from hip-driven to knee-driven limb movementsthrough theropod evolution."

You can watch a video of the tail in action here.

For those who have experienced appendicitis, the idea oftravelling over a speed bump while in its throes undoubtedly sounds veryunappealing. And for good reason: as determined by a team of researchers fromthe University of Oxford and Stoke Mandeville Hospital in the UK, patients withacute appendicitis experience an increase in pain when going over one.

The research included 64 participants, 34 of whom had a confirmed diagnosis ofappendicitis. Of these 34 appendicitis sufferers, 33 reported an increase in painwhile travelling over a speed bump. This could, the team said, be used as a toolfor identifying the condition in telephone assessments.

If you were going to get stung by a bee, you'd probablyprefer to get stung, say, on the back of your hand rather than inside yournose. Where would it hurt the most? Well, that's probably going to besubjective, but we know where it would hurt Michael L. Smith of CornellUniversity the most.

Following the research of Justin O. Schmidt, an entomologistwho ranked the relative pain of 78 species of insect stings, using a honey bee as abase reference, Smith allowed himself to be stung by a honey bee in 25different locations on his body, ranking them from the least to the most painful. The three least painful placeswere the top of his head, the tip of his middle toe and his upper arm. The three most painful places were his nostril, his upper lip and the shaft ofhis penis (which is great news for ladies).

If you think Smith is insane, think again: medicine has along and wonderful history of self-experimentation.You don't even want to know about Stubbins Ffirth.