The 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 2, at the 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. We will soon post video of the ceremony.

The nutrition prize went to Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is. The name of the paper is “The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips.”

The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland won the peace prize for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity. The reference is “The Dignity of Living Beings With Regard to Plants. Moral Consideration of Plants for Their Own Sake”

The archaeology prize was discovered by Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo in the paper “The Role of Armadillos in the Movement of Archaeological Materials: An Experimental Approach.”

The biology prize jumped to Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat. The title of the paper is “A Comparison of Jump Performances of the Dog Flea, Ctenocephalides canis (Curtis, 1826) and the Cat Flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis (Bouche, 1835).”

Dan Ariely of Duke University, USA won the medicine prize for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine. The reference: “Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy.”

Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University, Japan, Hiroyasu Yamada of Nagoya, Japan, Ryo Kobayashi of Hiroshima University, Atsushi Tero of Presto JST, Akio Ishiguro of Tohoku University, and Ágotá Tóth of the University of Szeged, Hungary had a cognitive feeling when they got the cognitive science prize for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles. To know more: “Intelligence: Maze-Solving by an Amoeboid Organism.”

Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, probably, did not enjoy adult shows, but they are the winners of the economics prize for discovering that a professional lap dancer’s ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings. Keep your eyes on the paper “Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?”

The physics prize was chained to Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots. If your hair is short enough, you can read their paper: “Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String.”

The chemistry prize was shared by two teams. Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA) discovered that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and to Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) discovered that it is not. Please do not test the information of these two papers in public spaces: “Effect of ‘Coke’ on Sperm Motility” and “The Spermicidal Potency of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola.”

The literature prize went to David Sims of Cass Business School. London, UK, for his lovingly written study “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations.”