Laugh, think, repeat...

It is our Christmas, birthday and Eurovision all rolled into one. So much more than a mere sardonic finger wag at the apparently ridiculous, the Ig Nobels celebrate scientific originality and curiosity in their most spectacular forms.

First make them laugh, then make them think – so goes the mantra of the Ig Nobels – and as the detritus of our celebration begins to clear, it is time to take you through some of this year’s victors and allow you to do just that. And we have to dwell here on the physics prize. This year it goes to the author of the spectacularly titled paper On the rheology of cats. If you have ever, in a moment of eye-glazed idleness, got lost in the many and various corridors of the internet you’ll know just how many amusing cats there are in the world. They can’t seem to get enough of squeezing themselves into unlikely containers to show us that they can. It’s simply showing off – a collective feline flaunt of the most braggadocious kind. Seriously, just google ‘cats in containers’ and you’ll see what we mean.

But there is, amazingly enough, something quite profound they have been trying to tell us – or ask us really. “Can we be both a solid and a liquid?” they plead as they slip from wine glass to Tupperware. And now Marc-Antoine Fardin, of the Université Paris Diderot and sole author of the paper, thinks it is worth finding out. “This actually raised some interesting questions about what it means to be a fluid and so I thought it could be used to highlight actually serious topics at the centre of the field of rheology, the study of flows,” he said.

In conclusion, much more work remains ahead, but cats are proving to be a rich model system for rheological research, both in the linear and nonlinear regimes

His paper, published in the Rheology Bulletin, explores how to calculate a cat’s Deborah number – the term used to describe fluidity. All very well and good – but do we have an answer for these long suffering kitties? Are they both a liquid and a solid? Fardin signs off his paper with a hedge: In conclusion, much more work remains ahead, but cats are proving to be a rich model system for rheological research, both in the linear and nonlinear regimes.

Best of the rest:

Anatomy Prize: This went to James Heathcote, a GP from Kent, for solving the long-standing mystery of why old men have such big ears. And you can put that received wisdom straight in the bin – it turns out they don’t keep growing, gravity stretches them.

Biology Prize: Goes to the Japanese/ Swiss/ Brazilian team Kazunori Yoshizawa, Rodrigo Ferreira, Yoshitaka Kamimura, and Charles Lienhard, for their discovery of a female penis, and a male vagina, in a cave insect.

Fluid Dynamics Prize: Gooes to Jiwon Han, for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks backwards while carrying a cup of coffee.

Medicine Prize: Anglo-French team of Jean-Pierre Royet, David Meunier, Nicolas Torquet, Anne-Marie Mouly and Tao Jiang scooped this for using advanced brain-scanning technology to measure the extent to which some people are disgusted by cheese. Very, it turns out.

Cognition Prize: Matteo Martini, Ilaria Bufalari, Maria Antonietta Stazi, and Salvatore Maria Aglioti, for demonstrating that many identical twins cannot tell themselves apart visually. Their brilliantly titled paper Is that me or my twin? Lack of self-face recognition advantage in identical twins, was published in PLoS ONE.

And if that weren’t enough, the ceremony, held at Harvard University, included the premiere of The Incompetence Opera, a mini-opera penned to be a musical encounter with the Peter Principle and the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It’s about how and why incompetent people rise to the top – and what that implies for everybody. Igs, we are forever in your shadow.