Podcast: Ig Nobel 2013

This week's podcast brings you our coverage of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes for the year's wackiest science. Presented last week, the awards honor research that "Makes you laugh, then makes you think." The research highlighted is by its nature zany, and the presentation ceremony itself is just as bananas.

Deborah Henson-Conant's electric harp warms up the audience before the show.

Marc Abrahams, founder of the Ig Nobels, greets the crowd while one of the show's human spotlights helps
 illuminate his good side.

Actual Nobel laureates are on hand to hand out the prizes. Here Dudley Hershbach (Chemistry 1986) Roy Glauber (Physics 2005) and Frank Wilczek (Physics 2004) rest before the strenuous task of passing out awards.

Moments after taking this photo, our intrepid photographer was pummeled by hundreds of paper airplanes. 

...The terrible aftermath.

Masanori Niimi accepts the medicine prize for his teams research into how opera music helps mice heal after heart transplants. Xiangyuan Jin demonstrates.

Winners of the first joint prize in Biology and Astronomy discovered that dung beetles can use the Milky Way to navigate. The team shows off their oversized non-dung models of the beetle's favorite food.
(Left to right: Marie Dacke, Eric Warrant, Emily Baird and Marcu Byrne)

Alberto Minetti and Yuri Ivanenko accept the physics award from Wilczek for researching how humans can run on water on the Moon. 

The secret to Moon water walking... plastic fins strapped to your feet and running really fast.

The thrill of discovery. Brian Crandall won the Archeology prize for finding out what happens to the bones of
shrews when you eat them. 

Don't worry Mr. Chef, the winners of this year's Chemistry Prize, Shinsuke Imai and his team, discovered why
 onions make you cry.

The real star of the show. The 2013 Ig Nobel prize handed out to each of the winners.