Three Australian academics — one who "unboiled" an egg, the other whose research uncovered the presence of the word "huh" in 31 languages — have been recognised in the Ig Nobel Prizes, a prestigious parody of the world's foremost scientific honour.

The Ig Nobels are awarded annually at Harvard University in honour of scientific achievements that "make people laugh, then make them think".

Professors Colin Raston from Flinders University in Adelaide took out the prize for creating the vortex fluidic device, which can unravel proteins or "unboil" an egg.

Another Australian, Callum Ormonde from the University of Western Australia, was one of the co-authors of Professor Raston's study, which was undertaken by an Australian/ US team.

The device — which the academic said stemmed from "a chance, 10-minute conversation" in 2012 — was first tested on a hen egg. Researchers managed to pull apart its tangled proteins and return the egg white to an earlier state.

"When you boil an egg, the egg white goes white because there's a protein in there," he said.

"It's like a bit of spaghetti coiled up, but if it's not coiled up properly, it'll start to stick to all these other ... proteins, so it forms a gel.

"So if you can actually get some form of energy back in to refold the bit of spaghetti so it's actually in the correct state, then you've unboiled an egg."

Professor Raston said the device allowed more tightly controlled chemical processes to be performed, saving researchers time and reducing their materials wastage.

One application already found allows improved delivery of a common cancer treatment drug, carboplatin, which is used against ovarian and lung cancers.

The device has allowed drug potency to be boosted as much as four-and-a-half times, Professor Raston said.

Professor Raston said he was humbled to travel to Harvard University to collect the award.

"It's nice to be recognised, though I have to say that a lot of people were involved in this particular discovery about unboiling an egg," Professor Raston said.

"It's not what we started out to do, but we developed technology that can do it. It's big-picture stuff."

'Huh' researchers take home prize for language study

Sydney University Professor Nick Enfield, with co-authors Dr Mark Dingemanse and Dr Francisco Torreira from the Max Planck Institute for Pyscholinguistics in The Netherlands, were also awarded an Ig Nobel, for their 2013 paper, Is 'Huh?' A Universal Word?

"In linguistics you generally learn there are no universal words — that words vary radically in terms of how they sound and what kind of meanings they may have and so forth," Professor Enfield said, adding that while words such as "dog" and "hund" might mean the same thing, they sound very different.

The researchers wanted to investigate whether people used language in the same ways.

To do this, they recorded videos of people conversing in villages around the world, leading to the discovery that the word "huh" is an indispensable tool in human communication.

"When we noticed suddenly that in very different languages spoken — in Africa and New Guinea, [in] Laos — that this one word sounded nearly identical and had an identical function ... it jumped out at us as something that's quite remarkable," Professor Enfield said.

The findings will enable researchers to look at language in action rather than abstract structures of grammar.

"There has been a lot of difficulty solving the problem of understanding what human language is like," Professor Enfield said.

"This work takes us into a new direction and says maybe we shouldn't look at those abstract structures, we should be looking at language in action."

The awards, now in their 25th year, are prestigious in their own right, with Nobel Laureates presenting Ig Nobel awards to winners.

"This is a serious study with serious implications about language, so we're delighted to have won this prize," Professor Enfield said.

He and his fellow researchers have followed up the 2013 study with a new paper, released this week, showing people on average stop for clarification in conversation once every 90 seconds.

Professor Raston said winning a Nobel Prize would be wonderful, but he was "very happy with an Ig".