The Ig Nobel awards are usually known as the "Igs" and are given out every year at around the same time as the real Nobel awards. The "Igs" are given for achievements that "make people laugh, and then make them think". The name "Ig Nobel" is a language joke. "Nobel" sounds like "noble" -- meaning "very honored". And Ig Nobel sounds like "ignoble" meaning the opposite of noble --- that is, "not honored^,."

According to Marc Abrahars, who co-founded the award in 1991, "Most prizes, such as Nobel Prize, reward the goodness of the people who receive them. These prizes are meant to honor the extremes of humanity-those whose achievements should be seen as very good."

"The Ig Nobel Prize isn’t like that. The Ig honors the great confusion in which most of us exist much of the time. Life is confusing. Good and bad get all mixed up. If you win an Ig, it shows that you have done something. What that thing is may be hard to explain. But the fact is, you did it, and have been recognized for doing it."

The Nobel science prizes encourage us to think that all over the world great discoveries are being made that will do good to the whole world. But real science is not like that. The main job of science is to find out what is not true. This leads people into areas of research that seem completely senseless. Why did a team of Japanese scientists spend months trying to teach birds to enjoy the paintings of Picasso? Why did a Norwegian biologist start a project to encourage insects to drink beer? It is hard to say. But it won them all an Ig.

Sometimes science tells us things that we don’t want or need to know. We don’t want to know that falling in love and going mad are exactly the same as far as the brain is concerned. And we don’t really need to know that worrying about money can cause tooth disease. Only the Ig award brought these great achievements to our attention.

Owww! A little girl wails after falling and bumping her knee. Her father rushes over and inspects the leg. “I’ll kiss it and make it better,” he says. The kiss works. The girl sniffles, wipes her eyes, then jumps up and gets back to playing. Her pain is forgotten.

Scenes like this one happen on playgrounds and in homes around the world every day. When a child gets a bump or bruise in Germany, says Ulrike Bingel, “someone will blow the pain away.”

A caring adult can seemingly stop a child’s pain with a puff of air, a kiss or even just a few kind words. Of course, none of these things can repair injured skin. So what’s happening? Doctors call it the placebo effect. It describes what happens when something that should have no effect triggers a real, positive change in someone’s body.

Placebos are a very important part of medical research. To prove that a new medicine works, researchers must show that people taking it improve more than people getting a placebo. This placebo is usually a pill that looks the same as the treatment but contains no medicine. At times a person may feel better after taking a placebo pill, even though the pill did not act on any disease or symptoms.

This placebo response isn’t an illusion. It comes from the brain. A placebo effect can only influence body processes that the brain can modify, such as pain or digestion.

Kathryn Hall, a medical researcher in Boston says, “Placebos don’t do anything for bacteria, but they can change how strongly someone experiences pain or other symptoms.” Other researchers are also trying to figure out why the placebo effect works. Ted Kaptchuk’s group has discovered that placebo treatments work better when a doctor spends more quality time with a patient.

Cats have a reputation as a cold and distant domesticated(家养的)animal. But they do feel affection towards their humans: they simply express it differently and it’s not just cat people saying it! Now there’s science to prove it, too.

Oregon State University researchers concluded that cats really do actually love their humans after conducting a new study on kittens, modeled after previous research on dogs and babies.

The study, published in Current Biology, examined how kitten subjects reacted after spending two minutes with their caregivers, being left alone, then reuniting for another two minutes. After the experiment, they sorted each kitten by their stress level called “attachment style. ”

64% of the kittens showed a “secure attachment style ” to their caregivers, meaning the cat seemed upset when they left the room but “displayed a reduced stress response” upon their return. On the other hand. about 30% of the kittens were found to have an “insecure attachment style”, which means their stress levels did not decrease upon their person’s return to the room. That said, this data is consistent with the study on human children—so the smaller percentage with insecure attachment styles is not specific to cats, contrary to popular belief.

Also of note: the percentage of cats with “secure” attachment styles is actually higher than dogs“, only 58% of dogs showed the ”secure“ attachment, while 42% were categorized as insecure.