Up the nose: Press reports about the Ig Nobel Prizes

The years bring ever more numerous intriguing, clever press reports and editorials about the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and the new winners. We’re collecting links to a few of the new ones, on our PRESS CLIPS page.

The Associated Press report include a generous helping of delicious photos, among them Charles Krupa’s instant-classic (it’s appeared on almost countless news and other sites worldwide) photo of the nasal-pork demonstration.

The Reuters report includes Brian Snyder’s photo of that same moment, seen from a different angle, that has achieved about-equal instant-classic status. That pork demonstration pertains to this year’s Ig Nobel Prize for medicine, awarded to Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, for treating “uncontrollable” nosebleeds, using the method of nasal-packing-with-strips-of-cured-pork.

If you know of other especially whatever news reports that we should add to our PRESS CLIPS list, we’d love to hear from you. Please send the URL(s), of course.

The extensive British and Japanese print, radio, and TV reports are always a treat to see. The Stockholm newspaper Dagens Nyheter always has an especially entertaining and informative account:

The Ig has always been cheerfully chuckled over in Sweden. Googling will turn up many of the other British, Japanese, Swedish, and other reports, if you’d like to indulge yourself. Sweden’s TV4’s report this year includes an interview with Hakan Westerberg, Swedish co-winner of the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize for biology, which honored a surprising discovery about herring.) The science media reports, of course, are a universe packed with delights; you might begin exploring those by reading Bethany Brookshire’s report in Science News: “Banana peel slipperiness wins IgNobel prize in physics“.

[Fun fact: More major news organizations in Hanoi [Vietnam] cover the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony than do news organizations in the Boston [USA] area, where the ceremony has been held for all of its 24 years.]

Here’s our own video recording (from our live webcast) of the entire 2014 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony:

This year, again, we provided a second live video stream: The NSA Courtesy Cam, for benefit of our presumed friends at security agencies around the globe. Here’s the recording of that NSA Courtesy Cam video, which as you’ll see and not hear, had some technical difficulties:

BONUS from the past: The Japanese network NHK’s documentary about the Ig Nobel Prizes, broadcast on Christmas eve in 2002: