2005 Ig Nobel Award Winners

The 2005 Ig Nobel Awards ceremony (officially The 15th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony) was held last night at Harvard University.

My favorite winner? The prize for research in fluid dynamics, awarded to a pair of European professors "for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report 'Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation.'"

The keynote address at the ceremony was delivered by 2003 prize winner Kees Moeliker who, the Ig Nobel site points out, "documented the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck". (Photos of that encounter -- you know you want them -- here.)

All of this year's winners and their astonishing achievements are here. (Scroll for previous years' winners.) 2005 ceremony video is here. Guardian coverage here.

I submit that both the penguin research and the gay mallard necrophilia may indeed be "cooler than a friggin' python exploding while trying to eat a friggin' alligator," but I'm willing to leave that to the judges.

[Cross-posted at The Agitator.]