Each year, around the time when the Nobel Prize recipients are announced, the Ig Nobel Prize winners gather at the Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre to claim their rewards. It may sound a bit confusing, but these awards are as real as it gets. Each year, remarkable discoveries, such as that of Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek into the mysteries of how hamsters recover from jetlag faster when given Viagra, or that of L. Mahadevan and Enrique Cerda Villablanca about how sheets become wrinkled, receive acknowledgements for the most improbable research.

This year was no exception, and 10 lucky winners claimed their prizes during the October 2 ceremony held at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. The ceremony, which receives the sponsorship of the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) magazine, included Nobel Laureate William Lipscomb and Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of the mathematical concept of fractals.

Every year, winners are elected from multiple categories, including some of the Nobel Prize categories, such as literature, peace, physics, chemistry, but also some genuine categories, such as public health, engineering, interdisciplinary research and more.

This year, the winner of the Nutrition prize was 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 crispier and fresher than it really is.

The Peace Prize went to The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plans have dignity.

The Archaeology Prize went to Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and Jose Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de Sao Paolo, Brazil, for meaduring 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.

The Biology Prize was awarded 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.

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 Cognitive Science Prize was awarded to 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, for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles.

Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, won the Economics Prize for discovering that a professional lap dancer's ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings.

Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, won the Physics Prize for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.

The Chemistry Prize was awarded to 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), for discovering 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) for discovering that it is not.

The Literature Prize was given to David Sims of Cass Business School, London, UK< for his study: “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations.”

The winners are expected to deliver speeches on the awarded papers during a ceremony to be held on Saturday, October 4, at the Ig Informal Lectures conference held at MIT.