Some people got bored of regular climbing, surfing, biking, diving, and other exciting stuff and are now practicing extreme ironing! Funny as hell!
But it really amazes me that they've got the motivation to take the iron and ironing board with them to all these unusual places in addition to the (not so few) normal sporting equipment! wish I had half this motivation!
The Ig Nobel Prizes "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think". It happens every year at Harvard University, and there are prizes for several areas such as economics, physics, chemistry, nutrition, and peace. This year's ceremony happened yesterday, and some of the winning research are really hilarious! I wish I could attend to one of those. My this-year favourites:
NUTRITION PRIZE. Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.
PEACE PRIZE. The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.
ECONOMICS PRIZE. University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that a professional lap dancer's ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings.
Last year's ceremony had some very unusual ones too:
MEDICINE: Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."
Can't figure out what the hell they were thinking about when they came up with such ideas, or if the initial idea was good and then it deviated "a bit"... :) well well, the important thing is that some scientists have sense of humor!
