Whale Snot Wins Ig Nobel

The Ig Nobel Awards, run by science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research, are with us again. Dr Acevedo-Whitehouse of the Zoological Society of London received her prize at yesterday's award ceremony, along with colleagues Agnes Rocha-Gosselin and Diane Gendron. They won the Engineering Prize for perfecting a method of collecting whale snot, using a remote-controlled helicopter. (Click the title link for a BBC video of the team's snot-collecting in action.) The Biology Prize went to Libiao Zhang (China) and colleagues for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats. (Don't ask!) The Management Prize went to Alessandro Pluchino (Italy) and colleagues for demonstrating mathematically that organisations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random. (Bankers take note.) The Improbable website was busy when I tried it: CLICK.