A science award that makes you laugh, then think

George and Charlotte Blonsky, who were a

married couple living in the Bronx in New York City,

invented something.

They got a patent in 1965,

for what they call,

"a device to assist women in giving birth."

This device consists of a large, round table

and some machinery.

When the women is ready to deliver her child,

she lies on her back,

she is strapped down to the table,

and the table is rotated at high speed.

The child comes flying out

through centrifugal force.

If you look at their patent carefully,

especially if you have any engineering background

or talent,

You may decide that you see

one or two points where the design is not

perfectly adequate.

Doctor Ivan Schwab in California

is one of the people,
one of the main people

who helped answer the question,

"Why don't woodpeckers get headaches?"

And it turns out the answer to that

is because their brains

are packaged inside their skulls

in a way different from the way

our brains, we being human beings,

true, have our brains packaged.

They, the woodpeckers, typically

will peck, they will bang their head

on a piece of wood thousands of times

everyday.

Everyday.

And as far as anyone knows,

that doesn't bother them in the slightest.

How does this happen?

Their brain does not slosh around like ours does.

Their brain is packed in very tightly,

at least for blows coming
right from the front.

Not too many people paid attention

to this research until
the last few years

when, in this country especially,

people are becoming curious about

what happens to the brains
of football players

who bang their heads repeatedly?

And the woodpecker maybe relates to that.

There was a paper published

in the medical journal The Lancet

in England a few years ago called

" A man who proceed his finger
smelled putrid for 5 years."

Dr. Caroline Mills and her team

received this patient and
didn't really know what

to do about it.

The man had cut his finger,

he worked processing chickens,

and then he started to
smell really, really bad

So bad that when he
got in a room

with the doctors and the nurses,

they couldn't stand being
in the room with him.

It was intolerable.

They tried every drug,

every other treatment
they could think of.

After a year, he still
smelled putrid.

After two years, still smelled putrid.

Three years, four years
still smelled putrid.

After five years, it went away on its own.

It's a mystery.

In New Zealand, Dr. Leann Parkin

and her team tested an old tradition

in her city.

They live in a city that has huge hills.

San Francisco-grade hills.

And in the winter there,
it gets very cold

and very icy.

There are lots of injuries.

The tradition that they tested,

they tested by asking people

who were on their way to
work in the morning,

to stop and try something out.

Try one of two conditions.

The tradition is that in the winter,

in that city, you wear your socks
on the outside of your boots.

And what they discovered by experiment,

and it was quite graphic when they saw it,

was that it's true.

When you wear socks on the outside
rather than inside,

you're much more likely
to survive and not slip and fall.

Now, I hope you will agree

with me that these things I've
just described to you,

each of them, deserves some kind of prize.

And that's what they got,

each of them got an Ig Nobel Prize.

In 1991, I, together with bunch of other people,

started the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.

Every year we give out 10 prizes.

The prizes are based on just one criteria.

One criteria, it's very simple.

It's that you've done something
that makes people laugh and think.

Whatever it is, there's something about it

that when people encounter it at first,

their only possible reaction is to laugh.

And then a week later,

it's still rattling around in their heads

and all they want to do
is tell their friends about it.

That's the quality we look for.

Every year, we get in the neighborhood

of 9,000 new nominations
for the Ig Nobel Prize.

Of those, consistently between 10 percent

and 20 percent of those nominations

are people who nominate themselves.

Those self-nominees almost never win.

It's very difficult, numerically,
to win a prize if you want to.

Even if you don't want to,

it's very difficult numerically.

You should know that when
we choose somebody

to win an Ig Nobel Prize,

We get in touch with that person,

very quietly, we offer them
the chance to decline

this great honor if they want to.

Happily for us, almost everyone
who's accepted a prize

decides to accept.

What do you get if you

win an Ig Nobel prize?

Well, you get several things.

You get an Ig Nobel Prize.

The design is different every year.

These are always handmade

from extremely cheap material.

You're looking at a picture

of a prize we gave last year, 2013.

Most prizes in the world also give

their winners some cash, some money.

We don't have any money,

so we can't give them...

in fact, the winners have to
pay their own way

to come to the Ig Nobel ceremony.

Which most of them do.

Last year, though, we did manage
to scrap up some money.

Last year, each of the 10

Ig Nobel Prize winners

received, from us,

10 trillion dollars.

A 10 trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe.

You may remember that Zimbabwe
had a little adventure

for a few years there of inflation.

They ended up printing bills

that were in denominations as
large as one hundred trillion dollars.

The man responsible, who
runs the national bank there,

won an Ig Nobel Prize in mathematics.

The other thing you win is an invitation

to come to the ceremony,

which happens at Harvard University.

And when you get there,

you come to Harvard's biggest
meeting place and classroom.

It fits 1,100 people,

it's jammed to the gills,

and up on the stage,

waiting to shake your hand,

to hand you your Ig Nobel Prize,

are a bunch of Nobel Prize winners.

That's the heart of the ceremony.

The winners are kept secret until that moment,

even the Nobel laureates who
will shake their hand

don't know who they are
until they're announced.

I am going to tell you about
just a very few

of the other medical related
prizes we've given.

Keep in mind, we've given
230 prizes.

They're lots of these
people who walk among you.

Maybe you have one.

A paper was published about 30 years ago

called "Injuries due to Falling Coconuts."

It was written by doctor Peter Barss,

who is Canadian.

Dr. Barrs came to the ceremony

and explained that as a young doctor,

he wanted to see the world.

So he went to Papua New Guinea.

When he got there, he went to work

in a hospital and he was curious,

what kinds of things happen to people
that bring them to the hospital?

He looked through the records,

and he discovered that surprisingly
large number of people

in that hospital were there

because of injuries due to falling coconuts.

One typical thing that happens is