SXC.HU, SIAS VAN SCHALKWYK

What started as spoofs of the Nobel Prizes more than two decades ago have become celebrated awards in their own right. This year’s Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony honored 10 teams for studies that “first make people laugh, and then make then think,” in categories spanning from medicine to archaeology.

The sold-out ceremony, hosted by the humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research this week (September 12), took place at Harvard. In attendance were four Nobel laureates, who assisted in dispensing the Igs—plus “triumphant handshakes”—to winners hailing from eighteen countries.

The medicine prize went to a team of Japanese scientists—two of whom accepted the award in mouse costumes—that investigated the effects of opera music on mice that had undergone heart transplants. The animals that listened to Verdi’s La Traviata lived after their operations nearly four times longer than those who did not receive a musical treatment, the study...