2009 Ig Nobel Prizes Awarded To 10 Distinguished Researchers And Innovators

8. The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize In Mathematics

Zimbabwe currency via asapafrica.org went to Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of number by printing bank notes in denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).   I certainly would have been better in math if I had to figure the speed of money traveling from surplus to deficit instead of the speed of a darn train leaving the station.

9. The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize In Biology

Love me, love my poop! (Giant panda from Vienna Zoo) went to Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.

The study, Microbial treatment of kitchen refuse with enzyme-producing thermophilic bacteria from Giant Panda feces, was conducted in 2001.  Perhaps, it has just come to the surface -- in someone's kitchen!

10. The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize In Veterinary Medicine

This cow is milked with love. (via visitbuckinghamshire.org) went to  Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless. 

Exploring Stock Managers' Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production proves that cows that fear humans produce much less milk than cows who have positive human relationships. In a survey of more than 500 British farm stock managers, it was learned that cows with names produce 258 liters more milk than unnamed cows in the same time period.

The Ig Nobel prizes are an annual event of Improbable Research, Research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.  Every year, real Nobel Prize winners show up to the Ig Nobels to join in the fun and the discussions of the winning works.