This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick.

And it's that time of year again.

The exact time of year again has shifts for us anyway.

Sometimes it's late September.

Other times it's early November.

But this is generally the window in which we aim to discuss the latest winners of the Ig Nobel Prizes.

The Ig Nobel's for anyone who has forgotten, or maybe you're new to the show, you don't know what I'm talking about.

It's a series of awards given out once a year by a scientific humor journal called The Annals of Improbable Research, edited for many years now by Mark Abraham's.

The publication's stated purpose is to, quote, honor achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.

You can learn much more about them at improbable.com.

They have a wonderful list where you can just, you can scroll through all the winners over the years, different peer-reviewed papers, scientific papers, and, and sometimes just individual researchers that are singled out for these different studies that are in one way or another comedic and hilarious, but also deep down our legitimate science

that is often answering very important questions or things on the borders of very important

questions, things that are still part of the ever-growing expanse of scientific curiosity.

Yeah. I would say usually are legitimate science.

Occasionally something will get highlighted that is itself intended to be satirical.

But I almost think of that as kind of like, remember in the days of America's Funniest Home

videos when there would be the occasional video that was funny on purpose?

I never liked that.

Even as a kid, I would watch that. I'd be like, uh-uh, that's not acceptable. You can only,

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