Volkswagen wins surprise award
Top Harvard University gong goes to Volkswagen for its Dieselgate effortsTroubled German car maker Volkswagen has picked up a surprise award worth trillions, but it’s not the kind of thing it will display with pride in the trophy cabinet.
It has won the Ig Nobel award for chemistry for its creative use of software to cheat emissions testing regimes around the world with its 'Dieselgate' four- and six-cylinder petrol engines.
The Ig Nobel awards are handed out in honour of the weirdest work carried out in the name of science around the world, with the main criteria that it makes people laugh, then think.
Winners are given a Zimbabwean $10 trillion note as an award and while that sounds significant, that converts to about 50 Aussie cents and is unlikely to help the Volkswagen Group pay off the nearly $US20 billion in fines, penalties, recalls and legal fees its cheating scandal has clocked over so far.
Volkswagen received the award for “solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electro-mechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested.”
The 26th annual Ig Nobel awards were presented at Harvard University, with trophies handed out by three Nobel laureates, physicist Roy Glauber, chemist Dudley Herschbach and economist Eric Maskin.
Other winners included the reproduction award for the late Egyptian researcher, Ahmed Shafik, who developed a range of pants for rats so he could study the effects of different materials on their sex lives.
UK and New Zealand researchers won the award for economics for a study on the perceived personalities of rocks from a sales and marketing perspective.
German researchers won the medical prize for discovering that an itch on your left side could be fixed by looking in a mirror and scratching your right side (go on, try it).
Two British researchers won the biology prize, with one of them living in the wild as an otter, a deer, a fox, a bird and a badger, and the other for developing prosthetic limb extensions to let him live and walk among goats.
The literature prize was won by a Swedish man for his three-part autobiography on “the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead.”
And, unlike Volkswagen, the Swede was there to collect his award.
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