Any parody being good to take, one will not spit on that one, which has amused us for seventeen years. Thursday evening, ten IG-Nobel (IG for “wretched”, it is thus of the anti-Nobel about which one speaks, you will have included/understood it) were decreed in the theatre of the Harvard university, in the United States, with enquiring truths of the five continents. And this, for the important ones and necessary work (and which should not especially be continued) like “the side effects of ingestion of sabre”, in the section medicine, or “the effects of Viagra on the feeling of shift time in the hamster”, enormous, with the ray sciences. Marc Abrahams, editor of the review scientifico-poilante Annals of improbable research, is at the origin and the orchestration of this ceremony which proceeded in the presence of nearly a thousand of spectators. In the jury, Marc Abrahams, obviously, and associations of researchers and students of Harvard.

With the handing-over of the prices, it is to say the size of the company and the faculty of the institution to automoquer, of “truths” prizes winner of Nobel Prize: Craig Mello (medicine 2006) or Roy Glauber (physique 2005) or William Lipscomb (chemistry 1976). All our congratulations go in Mayu Yamamoto, rewarded for his research on the vanilla extraction starting from dung for cow, or this essential opus on “the living organisms in the mattresses in the Netherlands”. Also let us congratulate the price nutrition decreed with a researcher on New York for this interesting “bowl bottomless” which autoremplit, or the price linguist on “the reactions different from the rats to hearing”, am held well, “in rewinding mode of a speech in several languages”.

One remembers that Jacques Chirac had grown France while receiving in 1996 the IG-Nobel price of peace for her celebration of the 50e birthday of Hiroshima by nuclear tests in the Pacific. Our favourite: rented either a laboratory of Dayton for its invention, the “gay bomb”, a chemical weapon which causes an irresistible sexual attraction between enemy soldiers. You see the interest of the lucky find in Iraq, for example?