The Ig Nobel Prizes are the alternative to the real Nobel Prizes, awarded to daft and surreal scientific discoveries by the Annals of Improbable Research at Harvard University each year.
Surprisingly, they are much sought after.
The fluid dynamics prize went to researchers who investigated the way coffee sloshes around in a mug as it's carried. Two scientists were at a conference when they watched people trying to prevent spillage as they hustled about during a coffee break.
They deduced that the reason coffee spills was because of a person's walking speed and their mental focus. So far, surprise surprise, it's the sort of research that comes from the University of the Flipping Obvious. But they added the rider that noise also contributed.
One of the scientists suggested designing a better coffee cup by using: "A series of annular ring baffles arranged around the inner wall of the container to achieve sloshing suppression."
Conversely, you could just carry it more carefully.
Other prizes went to the team that detected brain activity in a dead fish (they may next try the technique on senior politicians), researchers who discovered chimps can recognise other chimps by looking at photographs of their bottoms (I thought the whole nation had learnt that trick with Pippa Middleton at the royal wedding) and a device called a SpeechJammer that disrupts a person's speech by repeating his or her own voice at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds, creating an echo effect annoying enough to get someone to stop.
It has been suggested that this could ideally be used in the House of Commons except for the obvious drawbacks: MPs rarely listen to what they are themselves saying and would probably think the echo effect makes them sound like Shakin Stevens.
