This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Hope you had a peaceful and happy Thanksgiving.

Now, with the big feast in the past, we of course begin the long march towards the winter holidays,

fueled hopefully by some leftover turkey and pie. Well, here at Science Friday, the day after Thanksgiving is our own

kind of holiday observance featuring highlights from the year's Ig Nobel Award Ceremony. Now,

if you're not familiar with the Iggs, they are science awards for scientific research, real stuff,

that first makes you laugh and then makes you think.

The awards are handed out each year by the editors of the Science Humor magazine,

The Annals of Improbable Research.

So here's our post- Thanksgiving tradition as we hop in the sci-fry time machine

to travel back to mid-September on the campus of Boston University,

where the dignitaries and ignitaries are preparing to take the stage.

There's antimony arsenic, aluminum, selenium, hydrogen, and oxygen,neum, and nickel-eodium, neptuneum, germaneum, iron, amoreseum, ruthenium, uranium, uranium, uropium, zirconium, rutisium, vanadium, lanthanium, and azmium, acetine, and rhenium, and gallium, and iodine, and thorium, and fulium and thallium. There's itrium, eturbium, actidium, rubidium,

boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,

strontium and silicon and silver and samarium and berystromine lithium, beryllium and berymium.

That music may be familiar to many of you.

Tom Lehrer wrote those meticulously, ridiculously perfect lyrics and recorded that song

way back in 1959.

Tom Lehrer was in the audience at the very first Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in 1991.

He advised and helped with several of the early Ig ceremonies, especially with the operas. Tom died a few weeks ago at the age of 97.

We miss him.

And now Barry Duncan will give the traditional Ig Nobel welcome, welcome speech.

Welcome. Welcome.

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