well welcome to. rats in pants to personalities of rocks the man living as goats those are just a few of the achievements that won the nobel prize this year and award that's handed out for a ridiculously funny research but does the aig noble prize serve a greater purpose than just making people laugh is it making science. makes a mockery out of it well we asked the founder of the ig nobel prize the editor of the annals of improbable research magazine abrahams.

there are no limits to scientific curiosity even if it takes researchers to the very bizarre is there such a thing as useless research the work of scientists so absurd that. actually help us walk along the path of progress and how do you draw the line between a complete waste of time and the next big discovery. the founder of the ig nobel prize editor of the annals of improbable research magazine marc abrahams great to have you with us mark welcome to the show now tell us something is getting an ignoble price belittling or actually noble for scientists or is it an honor. well of course i cannot speak for what's in somebody who's mind it's more an honor than not when we give a prize almost always we first get in touch with the person very quietly and we

offer them the prize we give them the chance to decline to turn down this great honor if they want to so if somebody says no they don't get the prize so everybody's getting a prize pretty much has agreed to do it and then they come here to the united states at their own expense to be part of the ig nobel prize ceremony but you feel like it's an ornery right oh yeah it means you've done something that makes people laugh and then think and that's kind of wonderful in its way i know there are what seven yeah there are what seven billion people on the planet more or less and that's a lot of people and for most people including especially scientists no matter what you do during your lifetime almost nobody ever notices if you are awarded an ignoble prize you're going to get some attention from the world so for a lot of the winners it's an opportunity to have people pay attention that's for sure but i know for instance that the chemistry noble prize went to voltage in this

era for coming out with innovative ways to hide emissions from state regulators now that's obviously jaring at their attempt to cheat right. that's not very honorable is it. you can think of it as an appreciation. for volkswagen and we tried to get in touch with them it's a big corporation so we were never able to find the right person but you know all of these prizes have nothing to do with a good or bad so in a way i wasn't giving you a good answer an actual answer before as to whether this is an on or it's hard to say every other prize in the world is for the best of things you know the olympics earth for the best athletes or the worst of things the worst dressed awards are for the worst dressed people but with the ig nobel it has nothing to do with good or bad it has only to do with whether you've done something that makes people laugh and then think so you know was there

a spoof prizes at cirque casting award and you just set most people who receive it never refuse why is that i wonder are right are you are your lar it's not afraid of being laughed at i mean if i were to be awarded warse dressed of the year i would be horrified i wouldn't go outside of my apartment well yeah that's that's the worst dressed award but as i said this has nothing to do good or bad a lot of these things that win prizes are wonderful and some of them are the opposite of wonderful. but there are a lot of things in the world that are funny they happen to be funny in addition to whatever else they are they're important and they're funny they're worthless and they're funny so this is for a combination thing it's and it's a very unusual thing you know this is this something that forces you to laugh and then to think about it so that's what we're on but but the but a thing about laughing also has two sides to it i mean do you feel that maybe

laughing at someone's research and describing it i mean maybe the scientific community doesn't mean it this way put this scientists are mocked for doing seemingly useless or funny research like you put it that could be i don't know maybe you're mocking them but we're we're we're we're we're not mocking them you know this is why we give people the opportunity to say no but in most cases these things they themselves realize it's funny that's the whole thing about science when there's a true scientific discovery that's unexpected it's so unexpected that it's funny you know that that's almost the only reaction a person could have i never expected that the world that the universe works like this discovery a century or so couples injuries ago that there are these little tiny bugs everywhere that we can't see that have an effect on us that seemed crazy that

seemed insane it seemed funny also happens to be true but you say you don't feel like a noble prizes to service science because it makes it a laughing stock. no that's no that's not why we're doing this we're trying to do things that are so unusual. that they're pleasing you know they they make you laugh in most cases because it's the good kind of laughter it's i never dreamed that things could be like this kind of laughter ok so like you've sat almost everyone accepts it but there are some people i assume who declined since you give them a chance and privately to decline this honor what happens in this case is day award given to the next candidate in line yeah it's it's kind of rare that somebody says no but if somebody says no then that's the end of the conversation as it has never tell anybody and we give the prize to somebody else or it happens you

know every year or two there was somebody. in some of those cases they later got in touch with us and said they made a mistake they wish they had accepted the prize so it goes we had one prize we gave in the year two thousand to men and under a guy who was russian oh my god i wasn't in just ten years later was given. over by pardon me for bringing it up why did you ask me a question well the same thing the ten years after receiving the nobel prize for a game has been awarded the nobel prize in physics for what discovering graphene which is like a material that set to transform the electronics industry right now yeah he got the it guys for using magnets to levitate a frog how does one go from other areas of sanctions. i see you're laughing here. this is something about magnetism that

a few scientists knew about but almost no scientists remembered and when andre geim and his colleague rediscovered this they thought none of our colleagues are going to believe us so we better do something that seems so completely crazy that they'll pay attention that's why they chose to levitate a frog and people did pay attention ten years later andre got a nobel prize for something else but the details of that also are kind of goofy you know they were playing around with a pencil and some scotch tape and some paper and then they discovered a way to get this substance this graphene this two dimensional form of carbon that scientists knew in theory existed but they'd never been able to get enough of it before to do experiments so that experiment also was kind of goofy and funny looking although people people now just remember that it's important but it was also goofy so does it true scientists need to have a sense of humor well does

a true human being need to have a sense of humor i think is the the real question if you're doing science it helps you know scientists are trying to figure out things that nobody else was able to figure out ever and that means most of the time they're going to fail most of their job is to try something try something have it fail try something have it fail try something have it fail once in a while they get lucky and they discover something if you know that most of your job is going to be failure it really helps to have a sense of humor you know help you get through life and they cheerful and keep working so what does the ignoble prize look like tell us what it is this year the price is different it's handmade of cheap inexpensive materials here's the prize this year. our theme this year was time we have a theme for the ceremony and as you can see it's a round clock but it's an unusual clock each of the hands is

a little hourglass filled with sand and as the hands of the clock move around the sand is shifting there's another unusual thing about it too this year two thousand and sixteen is a year that's going to have one extra second a leap second added at the end of the year and our clock has an extra second it's sixty one seconds the other thing i mentioned is you notice there are letters here and they spell out the words ignoble prize as you go clockwise around the clock that's pretty impressive invention so when you decide to give the award what's more important being funny or having merit merit has nothing to do with it and a lack of merit has nothing to do it again the criterion it's the only criterion for winning a prize as you have done something that makes people laugh and then think you've done something so that when people first hear about it people anywhere anywhere in

the world no matter what their background will laugh but a week later they're still thinking about it and they want to tell their best friends about it and that's what wins you were prize maybe we should talk about some specific prize ok so i gave them as they think advised to they had of zimbabwe's central bank for printing hundred trillion dollar bills how does that make you think. well i hope it makes you think. in zimbabwe a few years ago they had a little problem with inflation of their money and they started printing bills in larger and larger amounts and they started printing million dollar bills billion dollar bills ten billion and they got up as high as a one hundred trillion dollar bill and at the same time the government was printing bills that said one hundred trillion dollars the head of the national bank also had them print a bill that said one cent so think about that the government's printing bills in one hundred trillion dollar amounts and one cent. this is unusual what's there to

think about and how many devices that happen there's a default in the country happens. well there was thinking gideon gono is the name of the man who was head of the country's national bank and he won the nobel prize for mathematics for doing this he wrote an entire book to explain to the people of zimbabwe and the world why he was doing this and why he thinks this is important and he said look when you have to spend large amounts of money like one hundred trillion dollars when you spend it you still have to make change and that's why you need these things if you think about that's rather unusual. right market is there some kind of prize does it not but when you put it that way certainly does. take a short break right now when we're back in couple of minutes we'll be back with marc abrahams to founder nobel prize a prize that celebrates to funny side of science to talk more about why it's

important to keep a sense of humor when dealing with serious scientific matters. because as you know provision of my book on to what it. is. you know. what it was but.

if it up as well i must. say what. but those were the oath they. were going to spend on one of the. the brothers one of these i will ask him i will write about him with us if you could a car bomb i just got that already yes if he thought of getting up there calling with you. manufacture consent to public will. when the writing close is a project. of the final.

week in the middle of the room sick. room. where back with marc abrahams a founder of the nobel prize which awards to world's funniest scientific achievements discussing the world's most improbable research welcome back to the show so mark how do you even find all the studies that are out there or do you have to go through every single publication era single journal to find something eccentric. everything is eccentric if you look at it the right way we're always

looking for things and we is about one hundred people at the ignoble board of governors spread around the world but more than that we've been doing this for twenty six years and it's got to be fairly well known every day every single day i get a flood of nominations from around the world anybody can send in a nomination so if somebody's listening today knows about a person who deserves an ignoble prize tell us in a typical year nine thousand or so new nominations and anything we don't give a prize to this year we look at again next year so there's a lot of stuff out there i should mention it's not just science we give prizes in other fields for example we gave a prize one year to the man who invented karaoke he's japanese as you might expect we gave him the ig nobel peace prize pretty much every year we have a peace prize we gave the inventor of karaoke of the peace prize rather than some

other category because by inventing karaoke he invented an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other that are good drunk and beat each other up because that happens a lot in a karaoke to at least that's the way it goes in russia. and very not everybody learns when given the opportunity so you mention to your team who are they who does this you know i think you have your own ignoble prize committee oh yeah it's about one hundred people it's the editors of my magazine the annals of improbable research a few people who've won ignoble prizes a few people who have won nobel prizes some journalists some teachers and some people who have no connection to anything we try for a real mix of people people who are filled with curiosity. and who does the funding for all this improbable research is that universities private investors

well yeah you're asking a really big question here so to try to give you a five hour answer compressed to about one minute you have a minute it's every case is different ok thank you for now i feel nervous every case is different some of these things are funded with government money in whatever country it is some of them are funded with corporate money some are private a lot of these are just not funded at all it's something that some scientists or somebody just did on their own a lot of these are very small experiments. with science even more than with most things something can look completely insane on the outside and then when you hear details you see people really had a pretty good reason for doing this but sometimes it takes more than twenty seconds to explain that there's a lot of stuff in the world and maybe if you think about what you do every day when you come to work you know what do you do every day from ten o'clock in the morning

to ten fifteen if you write down in great detail what you do that might look insane and the fact that you're being paid to do it might look kind of crazy but the fact is you are being paid to do it and probably there's a reasonably good reason you're doing things so it's a nice question and has a long answer but still like you are laurie it's they they usually stand out there quite extraordinary that one scientist dressed rats or yeah that's why we chose them and now they're attached purse that they claimed to himself and leapt like a goat in the swiss alps. do they know do they realize how bizarre and wacky their experiments appear to the outside world. sometimes yes sometimes no and there have been a few cases where when we telephone them and offer them the prize that was the first moment that they realised that what they've done seemed funny the one that

comes to mind that sticks in my mind is that there is a prize we gave about ten years ago to a team of scientists in australia they had spent a year doing experiments and they published a scientific paper with the title and analysis of the forces required to drag sheep across various surfaces repeat that an analysis of the forces required to drag sheep across various surfaces they had been doing some work they live in australia and a part of australia where sheep is the big industry and the people who run some of the big industries there have asked them to come in spend some time tell us what we're doing that is not efficient how we can improve it so they did and one of the things they discovered is that the sheep there are brought in every now and then to have the to be sheared to have the wool cut off and they're brought into these huge buildings it's thousands of sheep big electric cutters it's very dangerous a lot of sheep are injured a lot of people are injured and the efficiency could add up to

a lot of money because it's you know a lot of sheep passing through here one thing they discovered was this simple they discovered that it's easier to drag a sheep downhill right ten years of research. ok yeah because there was a lot of these buildings where they do this thing they were dragging the sheep. onto rather than down so that's a simple thing that took them a year to realize that ended up making a huge amount of money for that industry and yeah it's kind of funny i think so i want to talk about another prize that you gave about japanese scientists got the prize to sear for proving that a person. sees things differently one for instance standing on your hat and that makes things appear smaller i mean it's interesting. you know what have you tried that yourself i have i just understand was doing right now i can because i'm tied

down with with some wires but i have right before the show it's funny i've done with wires to hear you and i have to talk in the microphone but i have tried to write before the show and it's really funny. and i got like an energy boost because the blood went to my brain but i still go to their relevance to the real world and. what's the usefulness of this knowledge. well now you're you're wondering about you're thinking about it so we have our goal is met we've succeeded you've laughed at it and now you're thinking about it if you look at the details of it you'll find out that there were a lot of questions about how the eyes and the brain connect and how how images are interpreted in our minds. and it turned out that a lot of these questions get focused very directly when you ask this very odd question of how is the world seeming to be different when you're looking upside

down. so i would urge you here to go get a look at the scientist paper and it will open new worlds to you ok i would further urge you to to stand on your head to read it but that's not necessary at that should be the next step i should take it little by little that maybe a little too much altogether yeah what are they remove the wires yeah i mean so. you've met all this people right you met all these people who don't do it where the wires from you don't you're a or they don't stay there twenty four hours a day they do no good otherwise there will be i was there larry flager nobel prize if they did that i suppose right. keep that in mind. so tell me about all the scientists that you mean i mean you know them personally i assume how does like one for instance to dedicate lonesome own story when areas of their life to study homosexuals make her feel among ducks isn't just curiosity you know what i

am just a very unusual case yeah that was a prize we gave in the year two thousand and three to a scientist in the netherlands his name is case movie career he studies birds and he didn't spend all his life this this was a case where he happened to notice something unusual one day he runs a museum of natural history museum in the city of rotterdam and the museum had built a new. part of the museum it's all glass on the outside birds sometimes don't see the glass and then they see ashen to it so the people who who work there got used to hearing this sound but one day he was sitting there and he heard a really loud bang so he went and he looked out the window and he noticed something unusual and took notes that became the first scientifically reported case of was sexual necrophilia and on the dollar duck but it's only because he noticed

something of a more one one species of duck but it's only because he noticed this one thing and then he spent the next hour looking in taking notes but would you would you say it's just curiosity to drive someone to dedicate all this time to a topic like that oh yeah those scientists are people who are filled with curiosity various kinds that's why they're scientists and most scientists spend a long time looking at first one thing and then another trying to figure out they're not just sitting there stupidly staring at the thing all day long they're poking and prodding and trying to come up with ideas and test them and. trying to be really really really diligent about coming up with what's the true answer here rather than just my guess and almost anything they're looking at is going to seem kind of strange to somebody who does not spend all that time unfortunately there are people who will spend their lives doing this stuff because some of them discover things that make the rest of our lives

a little bit better some of them discover things that make it a little worse but hey who has been your favorite ignoble laurie at. oh there's been quite a few of the discover of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck has become a good friend and does all sorts of unusual things but oh there are so many more there is. there was one scientist who did some calculations about the old question of if you take a piece of toast you know you put butter on toast and you drop it and there's the old belief that if you drop a piece of butter dough butter toast it will always land on the buttered side was that true it turns out the physics of it says yeah that is true more often than not it will how if it is him later to test it on he had school children in england i think there are about ten thousand school. drop pieces of toast so first he did the calculations and then he had all these schoolchildren do it and it

turned out that the calculations were correct. pretty impressive well anyway as i talked to four hours but unfortunately my program. it was really fun and good luck with those wires and banks are going to get to it once we're done here thanks for your really funny insight were talking to abraham's founder and i will prize and the editor of the. improbable research magazine exploring they werent side of science and why a silly research is important that's it for this edition of sophie and co.

in the. film. it's. not a lot of money but about good but i'm about the same as our. money the less my money. decides.

to be made. for the people who post on the. feel so. sick. of being shot wounded taken prisoner. beef poisoned by people. products the said do not try all types of. trucks the. it was

a complete denial i think at all levels of government that there was any connection between berm pits and what these brave soldiers were suffering from to compensate every soldier marine airman and sailor that was on the ground that are complaining about illnesses from exposure from the berm pits would really literally send a v.a. broke and they don't want to pay it so the way he ended decades a lot of those soldiers will die in time and they will have to pay and. call for help and get the middle finger to their views to model is. delayed and i hope he does.

the headlines on aussie international we visit a russian family who claim to recognize a relative in a video filmed by a crew had been in baghdad. president trump doubled down on his fire and fury threats to north korea despite a wide criticism on coals for deescalation from both out home. and u.k. group called the x. muslim council which attended an elegy beatty parade is blamed for feeding and sunni islamic hysteria.