Ig Nobel Honours Ponytail Physics
Ig Nobel Honours Ponytail Physics
Patrick Warren, Raymond Goldstein, Robin Ball and Joe Keller picked up their prestigious award at a sellout gala ceremony at Harvard University.
Igs are intended as a bit of a spoof on the more sober Nobel science prizes.
Other 2012 winners included teams that studied how chimps could recognise each other from their behinds and why coffee will spill out of a moving mug.
But although some of this celebrated research might sound daft, much of it is intended to tackle real-world problems and gets published in peer-reviewed, scholarly journals.
Dr Warren, who is a researcher for Unilever in the UK, said he was thrilled to pick up his Ig.
“I’m amazed that a piece of work I’ve done has attracted so much attention,” he told BBC News.
“My field, statistical physics, is not something that many will have heard of, so I’m really pleased we’ve done something that’s caught the imagination.”