Dignified Alpine plants, Switzerland

Cambridge, Massachussetts, USA (GenevaLunch) – Little Switzerland made a big name for itself Thursday night by taking the Ig Nobel prize for peace, awarded by Improbable Research.

The honour went to the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-human Biotechnology, and to the citizens of Switzerland, “for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.” Switzerland was on the stage with a varied group of winners that included:

NUTRITION PRIZE. Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of 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.

BIOLOGY PRIZE. Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert,, and  Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.

MEDICINE PRIZE. Dan Ariely of Duke University, USA, for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine.

ECONOMICS PRIZE. Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that a professional lap dancer’s ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings.

PHYSICS PRIZE. Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.

These were the 18th First Annual Awards by Improbable Research, devoted to “research that makes people laugh and then think.”

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