Dropping in on the Ig Nobel after-party

The Ig Nobel after-party, each year, is a chance for the new Ig Nobel Prize winners and the other ceremony participants to get together and let their hair (if they have any) down. Journalist Carmen Nobel came to this year’s party, and wrote about that experience, for Science Friday. Here are snippets of her entire report:

Who’s Got the Biscotti? Mingling at the Ig Nobel Awards After-Party

BY CARMEN NOBEL

At a Boston-area house party this past Saturday, the man of the hour is an 86-year-old Japanese inventor who claims more than 3,500 patents and counting….

Winners travel from all over the world to attend the annual festivities, which include an operatic ceremony at Harvard’s Sanders Theater and a lecture series at MIT. The weekend culminates at the brownstone home of Jackie Baum (an artisanal cookie maker) and Stanley Eigen (a math professor), who have hosted an informal after-party every year since the Prizes debuted. (Read about last year’s party here.)

The guest list comprises past and present Ig Nobel winners; prize ceremony staffers; and local scientists, such as renowned psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason, who tonight is wearing a medal she won 66 years ago for excelling in 12th grade Spanish. For much of the evening, she discusses Chinese grammatical particles with Kang Lee, a developmental neuroscience professor at the University of Toronto who won the 2014 Neuroscience Prize “for trying to understand what happens in the brain when people see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.” …

Back in the dining room, honored scholars nibble honey-laced biscotti as they discuss the topics that earned them a spot here.

Members of two research teams bond over their shared Public Health Prize for “investigating whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat.” One winning study looked at links between toxoplasmosis and schizophrenia. The other used data from electronic medical records to describe a relationship between cat bites and human depression….

One outstanding question: Why do some dogs walk in a circle before relieving themselves, and what makes them decide whether to go clockwise or counterclockwise?

“We’re looking for a common denominator,” says Sabine Begall, an assistant professor of zoology at the University of Duisburg-Essenand and member of Burda’s team.

Begall was thrilled to win an Ig Nobel. “It’s a lifetime experience,” she says. “Accepting the prize on that stage was the most intense 60 seconds of our lives.”

We eagerly await the day after Thanksgiving, when the Science Friday radio program extends its annual (since 1992) tradition of broadcasting a specially edited version of the year’s Ig Nobel ceremony.