I'm the Ars correspondent responsible for the Nobel Prize coverage. And each autumn, the fact that they're coming up tends to slip my mind until a very specific moment: the announcement of the Ig Nobel Prizes, organized by the Annals of Improbable Research. Each year, honorees are cited for doing scientific work that, at first glance, seems devoid of sane motivation. But sometimes (not always) a more careful look at their work shows that it's getting at a serious scientific issue, if perhaps in a baroque or roundabout way.

This year's awards, handed out at a ceremony that traditionally includes everything from a mini-opera to a Nobel Laureate acting as an official Sweeper of Paper Airplanes, was no exception. I'm partial to the science behind figuring out the brand personality of rocks, since it adds rigor to a field that was apparently lacking it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here, in no particular order, are the honorees.

Medicine: This one's a bit weird. A group from the University of Luebeck figured out that, if you put someone with an itch in front of a mirror and have them scratch the wrong side of their body, the itch still goes away. The brain is a strange place.

Economics: An international team took this one home for measuring the brand personality of rocks. This is actually serious science; apparently, brands may have personality traits that, just like the big-five human personality traits, can be quantified. Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson found that the methods used to identify a brand's "personality" also work on rocks: "the rock stimuli has a distinct BP, and... the personality is developed from sometimes surprisingly detailed personifications." Which, obviously, raises questions as to whether brand personality measures anything meaningful.

Chemistry: While this could arguably have taken home the economics prize, Volkswagen's magical engine performance got the "win" in chemistry. Nobody from the company was on hand to receive the award.

Peace: I'm not sure why this one ended up as Peace, but it definitely has the honor of being the only paper on the list that I'd read before the prize announcements: "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit." What exactly is pseudo-profound bullshit? Brilliantly, the authors illustrate it with a tweet from Deepak Chopra and highlight how randomizing the words doesn't make it any more meaningful. "It may have been constructed to impress upon the reader some sense of profundity at the expense of a clear exposition of meaning or truth," the authors conclude. Four of the five authors attended the awards.

Reproduction: This is the first time I've seen a posthumous Ig Nobel, going to Ahmed Shafik. For reasons that were probably clear to Shafik, he dressed male rats in pants made from various fabrics, including polyester and wool, and then checked how often they mated. "The electrostatic potentials generated on penis and scrotum were also measured," according to his abstract. The conclusion: natural fibers are better for randy rats. He followed up on that by putting human testicles in a polyester sling, again checking "electrostatic potentials generated by friction between the polyester suspensor and the scrotal skin." Apparently, the sling made for an effective contraceptive, possibly by raising testicular temperatures (as measured by the "rectal-testicular temperature difference," naturally).

Biology: This one goes to a pair of books, so I'll quote the citation:

Awarded jointly to: Charles Foster, for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and to Thomas Thwaites, for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming hills in the company of, goats.

The museum in Rotterdam that now hosts the goat suit generously allowed it to make an appearance at the awards ceremony.

Physics: That's physics with a strong dose of biology, with two different teams of researchers being recognized. Both studies involved the perception of polarized light. In one, a bunch of Hungarians figured out that the local dragonflies couldn't tell the difference between a polished black tombstone and a small body of water, and so they tended to congregate in a cemetery. The other team showed that white horses have an advantage, despite being easier for predators to spot and suffering from higher rates of cancer due to their inability to reflect UV light. It turns out that a parasite-carrying fly homes in on prey using polarized light reflected off white coats, and it simply can't see white horses as easily.

Psychology: For a variety of things, humanity exhibits what's called an inverted U-shaped curve. We're terrible at them as kids, quickly rise to proficiency and stay there well into adulthood, and then decline again with age. This applies to everything from our analytical abilities to our athletic skills. The Psychology award recognized a team of researchers that added another thing to the list: lying. Extra credit to the authors for using visitors to a science museum to do the testing.

Literature: Kudos to author Fredrik Sjöberg for being willing to be at the ceremony in person to see his autobiography honored. The award citation said the first volume of his trilogy describes "the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead."

Perception: This study asked a simple question: do things appear to be the same size when you bend over and look at them between your legs? The answer is no, as determined by a carefully controlled study in which some subjects wore goggles that inverted their vision in order to make it appear like they were bent over. Their conclusion is that body orientation influences visual perception. Why they chose to ask this in the first place...