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Swinging ponytails and sloshing coffee win IgNobels

Ignobels 2012 Why ponytails sway from side to side, how to avoid spilling your coffee as you walk and why leaning makes the Eiffel Tower look smaller have received recognition at this year's IgNobel Prizes.

The prizes are given every year by the Annals of Improbable Research, based at Harvard University, as a 'tongue-in-cheek' counterpart to the Nobel Prizes, which will be awarded next week.

Rouslan Krechetnikov and Hans Mayer of the University of California, Santa Barbara received the fluid dynamics prize for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.

The physics prize was awarded to Joseph Keller, Raymond Goldstein, Patrick Warren and Robin Ball for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.

Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan and Tulio Guadalupe were given the psychology prize for showing that leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower seem smaller.

The work explored how posture influences estimations of size: with leaning to the left correlating with lower estimates, and leaning to the right correlating with higher estimates.

The team tested this by placing 33 undergraduates on a Wii Balance Board, which tilted slightly to the left or the right while they were asked to guess the size of objects, including the height of the Eiffel Tower.

For discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends, Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny have been given the anatomy prize.

IgNobels also went to researchers for creating the SpeechJammer - a machine that disrupts a person's speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay - and for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere - even in a dead salmon.

Craig Bennett of the University of California, Santa Barbara and colleagues showed photos to the dead fish and asked it to determine what emotion the person was feeling.

"By random chance and by simple noise, we saw small data points in the brain of the fish that were considered to be active," says Bennett. "It was a false positive. It's not really there."

The often-quoted study exposed the perils of fMRI science, which can be prone to false signals, and underscored the need to do statistical corrections to safeguard against such silly findings.

The US Government General Accountability Office received the literature prize for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.

Each new winner was permitted a maximum of sixty seconds to deliver an acceptance speech. The time limit was enforced by a pair of eight-year-old girls yelling "Please stop, I'm bored".

Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, closed the ceremony with the traditional, "If you didn't win an Ig Nobel prize tonight, and especially if you did, better luck next year."

A full list of winners appear on the IgNobels website.