Image copyright TIM BOWDITCH Image caption Mr Thwaites found that he soon developed "friends" 
 
 A British man who lived in the Alps as a goat for three days has won one of this year's Ig Nobel prizes. 
 
 Tom Thwaites had special prostheses made so he could walk like an animal. 
 
 The spoof awards, which are not quite as famous as the real Nobels, were handed out during their annual ceremony at Harvard University, US. 
 
 Other studies honoured during the event examined the personalities of rocks, and how the world looks when you bend over and view it through your legs. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Thomas Thwaites: 'I tried to take a holiday from being a human being by being a goat' 
 
 On the surface, all the celebrated research sounds a bit daft, but a lot of it - when examined closely - is actually intended to tackle real-world problems. 
 
 And nearly all of the science gets published in peer-reviewed, scholarly journals. 
 
 It is unlikely, though, that the German carmaker Volkswagen will appreciate the point or humour of the Ig Nobels. 
 
 The firm has been awarded the chemistry prize for the way it cheated emissions tests. 
 
 Image copyright AP Image caption Paper planes are all part of the fun 
 
 Image copyright TIM BOWDITCH Image caption Mr Thwaites very nearly got into a fight 
 
 Goat-man Tom Thwaites actually shares his biology prize with another Briton, Charles Foster, who also has spent time in the wild trying to experience life from an animal's perspective. 
 
 Clearly, the practice is fast-becoming a national trait. 
 
 Mr Thwaites concedes his effort was initially an attempt to escape the stress of modern living, but then became a passion. 
 
 He spent a year researching the idea, and even persuaded an expert in prostheses, Dr Glyn Heath at Salford University, to build him a set of goat legs. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Watch Thomas Thwaites in action 
 
 Image copyright AP Image caption Charles Foster has lived variously as a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird 
 
 Fascinating, if a little bizarre on occasions, was Mr Thwaites' verdict on the whole venture. He developed a strong bond with one animal in particular - a "goat buddy", but also very nearly kicked off a big confrontation at one point. 
 
 "I was just sort of walking around, you know chewing grass, and just looked up and then suddenly realised that everyone else had stopped chewing and there was this tension which I hadn't kind of noticed before and then one or two of the goats started tossing their horns around and I think I was about to get in a fight," he told BBC News. 
 
 The American science humour magazine, the Annals of Improbable Research, is the inspiration behind the Ig Nobels, which are now in their 26th year. 
 
 Thursday night's ceremony was reportedly as chaotic as ever, with audience members throwing the obligatory paper planes while real Nobel laureates attempted to hand out the prizes. 
 
 Image copyright IG NOBELS Image caption A time of celebration: The 2016 Ig Nobel Prize 
 
 The full list of winners announced at Harvard's Sanders Theatre: 
 
 Reproduction Prize - The late Ahmed Shafik, for testing the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats. 
 
 Economics Prize - Mark Avis and colleagues, for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective. 
 
 Physics Prize - Gabor Horvath and colleagues, for discovering why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses, and for discovering why dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones. 
 
 Chemistry Prize - Volkswagen, for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested. 
 
 Medicine Prize - Christoph Helmchen and colleagues, for discovering that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body (and vice versa). 
 
 Psychology Prize - Evelyne Debey and colleagues, for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers. 
 
 Peace Prize - Gordon Pennycook and colleagues, for their scholarly study called "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit". 
 
 Biology Prize - Awarded jointly to: Charles Foster, for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and to Thomas Thwaites, for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming hills in the company of, goats. 
 
 Literature Prize - Fredrik Sjoberg, for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead. 
 
 Perception Prize - Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs. 
 
 Image copyright Reuters Image caption Nobel Laureates Eric Maskin and Dudley Herschbach play "Tick-Tac-Toe" ("Noughts and Crosses") 
 
 Image copyright AP 
 
 For those who cannot abide this sort of nonsense, the real Nobel Prizes are handed out the week after next. 
 
 Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos ||||| "And the chemistry prize goes to … Volkswagen!" The announcement, made last night in a packed hall at Harvard University, was unlikely to please the car company, however. That’s because it was awarded "for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested," explained Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research . 
 
 This isn't your typical scientific gig. In a room packed with Nobel laureates, opera singers, and whizzing paper airplanes, this could only be one event: the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. This marks the 26th year of the contest that celebrates scientific studies that "make you laugh, and then think." 
 
 Just like the $10 trillion prize accepted on stage by the winning scientists—it is a Zimbabwean banknote with little value as a result of hyperinflation—many of this year's studies focused on perception and deception. 
 
 Take for example the Ig Nobel Prize–winning study of itches by a team of neurologists and psychologists at the University of Lübeck in Germany, published in PLOS ONE in 2013. The researchers injected a chemical under the skin of people's arms to cause a mild itch. The volunteers were then asked to scratch one of their arms while looking at themselves in a mirror. The catch was that the mirror and a real-time video camera controlled which arm appeared to be scratched. Sometimes the participants scratched the truly itchy arm but it looked like their nonitchy arm was being scratched, and vice versa. And surprisingly, the subjects reported significant itch relief even when they scratched the wrong arm—as long as it looked like the itchy arm was getting scratched. 
 
 Misperception in the nonhuman world also got the Ig Nobel nod. Two studies of confused animals led by Gábor Horváth, a biophysicist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, garnered a joint prize. The first was a study of dragonflies published in 2007 in Freshwater Biology . The mystery was why dragonflies were spending so much time on polished black gravestones in Hungarian cemeteries where the insects' prey were nowhere to be found. The females were even depositing their eggs on the stone surface where they had no chance of surviving. The answer? Polarized light. The insects detect their watery homes by looking for the polarized light that shimmers on its surface. It turns out that the black gravestones reflect similar polarized light, turning them into a literal graveyard for dragonflies. 
 
 Then Horváth turned to the mystery of horse flies. Why do they prefer to bite dark horses over white ones? In a study published in 2010 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B , he discovered the answer: Polarized light strikes again. Horses with pure white fur are much prized by breeders and suffer a range of maladies—including sunburn—but they have a built-in advantage. White horse fur does not reflect the characteristic polarized light that the blood-sucking insects use to find their lunch. 
 
 But perhaps the ultimate exploration of animal confusion goes to Charles Foster and Thomas Thwaites. Foster is an ethicist and veterinarian based in Oxford, U.K.; Thwaites is a technologist based in London, and both of them have spent significant amounts of time pretending to not be humans. Foster, who wanted to better understand the nonhuman "worldview," lived for days at a time as a badger, sleeping all day and roaming the forest all night on his hands and knees hunting for earthworms to eat. The animal of choice for Thwaites was an elephant, but he deemed it too dangerous and difficult of a transformation, so he settled on being a goat. 
 
 This required the design of prosthetic limbs and intense physical training. He spent days with goats in the Swiss Alps, chewing grass and generally trying to fit in with the herd. What did he learn from his immersive exploration of the goat world? It's crucial to have friends in the intensely hierarchical world of the herd, and Thwaites says he was lucky to have a goat "buddy." All their hard work paid off last night as they accepted their $10 trillion prizes. 
 
 The rest of the 2016 Ig Nobel Prizes: 
 
 REPRODUCTION PRIZE 
 
 The late Ahmed Shafik of Cairo University, for studying the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats, and for then conducting similar tests with human males. 
 
 ECONOMICS PRIZE 
 
 Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson, for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective. 
 
 PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE 
 
 Evelyne Debey, Maarten De Schryver, Gordon Logan, Kristina Suchotzki, and Bruno Verschuere, for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers. 
 
 PEACE PRIZE 
 
 Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang for their scholarly study called "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit." 
 
 LITERATURE PRIZE 
 
 Fredrik Sjöberg, for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead. 
 
 PERCEPTION PRIZE 
 
 Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs. ||||| Nobel winning scientists gather for 26th straight year to award the most absurd, strange and curious research of the year 
 
 Investigations into rats wearing pants, the personalities of rocks and the truthfulness of 1,000 liars won Ig Nobel prizes on Thursday night at Harvard, where Nobel-winning scientists gathered to honor the strangest research of the year. 
 
 2015 Ig Nobel prizes: dinosaur-like chickens and bee-stings to the penis Read more 
 
 The ceremony, now in its 26th year, delivered a $10tn Zimbabwean bill (about 40 cents in US money) to winners. Those who traveled to Boston received their prizes from Nobel laureates: chemist Dudley Herschbach, economist Eric Maskin, Dr Rich Roberts and physicist Roy Glauber. 
 
 As in past years, the tone of the awards show vacillated from gleeful absurdism to satire to genuine wonder at the lengths to which scientists will let their curiosity lead them. 
 
 Egyptian urologist Ahmed Shafik, for instance, wanted to know the toll that trousers might take on male rats. He made murine trousers – covering the animals’ hind legs with a hole for the tail – in various cloths: 100% polyester, 50/50% polyester/cotton, all cotton and all wool. 
 
 Rats that wore polyester showed “significantly lower” rates of sexual activity, Shafik found, perhaps because of the electrostatic charges created by the material. Cotton- and wool-wearing rats were relatively normal. 
 
 Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes and Shelagh Ferguson, a team from New Zealand and the UK, won the prize in economics for a study of the personalities of rocks. The trio studied a concept called “brand personality”, or the “set of human characteristics associated with the brand” – for example wholesomeness, youth, intelligence and sophistication – by putting pictures of rocks in front of 225 Kiwi students. 
 
 The students then decided which of 42 traits, 15 facets and five factors to apply to the rocks in question. One, Rock G, was variously described as “a big New York type businessman, rich, smooth, maybe a little shady” and “carries a black brief case, slick hair, quick thinker and quicker talker. Not a good dude though.” 
 
 Rock I was described by one student as “a gypsy or a traveller, a hippie” and by another as “liberal, attractive and female, I saw a young person, maybe mid-30s, who was very attractive when she was younger/possibly a model. Has her own way of thinking, with a somewhat grounded confidence, enjoys organic food.” 
 
 The third rock, Rock H, was called “modest”, “farm mechanic” and “down-to-earth”. 
 
 
 
 The biology award went to two Britons: Thomas Thwaites, who created prosthetic limbs that let him move like and among goats, and Charles Foster, who has tried to live as a badger, an otter, a fox and a stag. 
 
 As a badger, Foster ate worms, dug a hillside den and tried to sniff out voles. Living as an urban fox, he scavenged through trash and slept in gardens. As a goat, Thwaites infiltrated a herd in the Swiss Alps and spent three days eating grass, bleating and stumbling over rocks. 
 
 Foster and Thwaites wrote books about their experiments, respectively Being a Beast and GoatMan. 
 
 A coalition from the US, Canada, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands won the psychology award, for asking 1,000 liars how often they had lied over the course of their life, and rating how well they lied. 
 
 People gradually lied more as they aged out of childhood, the study found, peaking during adolescence, and as adults lied on average twice a day. Lying decreased with age, although some prolific liars may have skewed results. The researchers also acknowledged that the liars might have been lying to them all along. 
 
 The peace prize went to a gang of philosophers from Canada and the US who published a paper titled On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit. 
 
 The researchers studied how people understand gibberish that has been framed as if it means something, by creating random but grammatical sentences of buzzwords that sounded like vaguely meditative posters meant to inspire office drones or distract dental patients from the drill. Examples included “wholeness quiets infinite phenomena” and “hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty”. 
 
 “There is little question that bullshit is a real and consequential phenomenon,” the scientists wrote, warning that given advances in communication, “bullshit may be more pervasive than ever before”. 
 
 They noted, for example, that Dr Deepak Chopra, an author and MD followed by millions on Twitter, once wrote: “Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.” 
 
 Their mission: “Are people able to detect blatant bullshit? Who is most likely to fall prey to bullshit and why?” 
 
 The philosophers asked 280 students at the University of Waterloo to rate the “profoundness” of real and invented statements on a scale of one to five, and to search for meaning in those statements. Those students most “receptive to bullshit”, they found, were “less reflective, lower in cognitive ability” and more likely “to hold religious and paranormal beliefs”. 
 
 The researchers admitted their study had limitations, writing: “Although this manuscript may not be truly profound, it is indeed meaningful.” 
 
 A medicine prize was given to German scientists who found that if you have an itch on your left side, you can look into a mirror and scratch your right to relieve it. A perception prize was handed to two Japanese researchers who tried to learn whether bending over and looking at things between your legs changes how things appear. 
 
 Physics awards were given to researchers from Hungary, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, who found that white horses attract fewer horseflies and that dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones. The award for literature went to a Swedish author, Fredrik Sjoberg, who wrote a trilogy about collecting flies. 
 
 The most surprising winner was for chemistry: the automaker Volkswagen, caught for violating US emissions law, was granted a nearly worthless Zimbabwean bill to help pay for its massive legal costs. The Ig Nobel committee said the award was “for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electro-mechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested”. ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption High-speed video footage - like this of a goat, a cow and an elephant - was used to model the fluid dynamics of urination (footage: Georgia Institute of Technology) 
 
 A study showing that nearly all mammals take the same amount of time to urinate has been awarded one of the 2015 Ig Nobel prizes at Harvard University. 
 
 These spoof Nobels for "improbable research" are in their 25th year. 
 
 The team behind the urination research, from Georgia Tech, won the physics Ig. 
 
 Using high-speed video analysis, they modelled the fluid dynamics involved in urination and discovered that all mammals weighing more than 3kg empty their bladders over about 21 seconds. 
 
 Their subjects included rats, goats, cows and elephants - and although the findings reveal a remarkably consistent "scaling law" in bigger beasts, they also emphasise that small animals do things quite differently. 
 
 Rats can urinate in a fraction of a second, for example. This might make rodents a poor choice for studying urinary health problems. 
 
 "We don't have a proper animal model for urinary system research," said the study's lead author Patricia Yang, a PhD student in mechanical engineering. 
 
 Image copyright PNAS Image caption Serious business: A figure from Ms Yang's academic paper 
 
 She told the BBC there might also be physical lessons to learn, from the adaptability of the system in bigger creatures. From water towers to drinking backpacks, Ms Yang said, "every time we need a new function, we figure out a new design for it. 
 
 "But in nature, they just have one system for all different sizes. This might inspire us - we could have a scalable design that fits different purposes." 
 
 Ms Yang and three colleagues published their findings in the journal PNAS last year, and on Thursday all four researchers were present to accept their prize at the Ig Nobel ceremony. 
 
 Sting when you're winning 
 
 Run by the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research, this is a jubilantly irreverent affair. It has become world famous for recognising scientific achievements that "make people laugh, and then think". 
 
 This year's Ig winners travelled from six continents to accept their trophies. The triumphant research included a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg, and the discovery that the word "huh?" occurs in every human language. 
 
 Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption Q: Where do bee stings hurt most? A: Not on your arm 
 
 Another recipient, Michael Smith from Cornell University, ranked the pain of bee stings on different parts of the body, by orchestrating repeated stings to the four corners of his own anatomy. These ranged from the skull, the middle toe and the upper arm (at the less painful end) to the penis shaft, the upper lip and the nostril. 
 
 Marc Abrahams, the Ig Nobels' founder and the evening's master of ceremonies, closed the event with his customary punchline: "If you didn't win an Ig Nobel prize tonight - and especially if you did - better luck next year." 
 
 Drive-by diagnosis 
 
 A group from the UK was also on the prize list, for testing whether pain experienced when driving over speed bumps can help diagnose appendicitis. 
 
 The idea started as a running joke among surgeons, but Helen Ashdown decided to test it out while working as a junior doctor at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury. 
 
 "It's quite a residential area, so it's a town that does have a lot of speed bumps," said Dr Ashdown, now a GP and a lecturer at the University of Oxford. "We noticed that quite a few of the patients who had appendicitis said how bad the journey to hospital had been." 
 
 Sure enough, in a formal study of 101 patients, 33 of 34 people who were diagnosed with appendicitis reported pain travelling over speed bumps. 
 
 Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption Calming traffic, diagnosing appendicitis 
 
 "It's a test that has high sensitivity, so it's a good rule-out test," Dr Ashdown told BBC News. In other words, a patient who does not experience speed bump pain is very unlikely to have appendicitis. But such pain can also have other causes - so speed bumps make a poor "rule-in" test. 
 
 Nonetheless the work produced a paper in the British Medical Journal and, now, an Ig Nobel prize for diagnostic medicine. 
 
 "It came as a complete shock," Dr Ashdown said, but she is adjusting. "The more I find out about them, the more of an honour it seems to be to get one." 
 
 Walk like a dinosaur 
 
 Dr Rodrigo Vasquez, from the University of Chile, received the biology Ig Nobel for the crucial observation that if you raise a chicken with a weighted, artificial tail stuck to its backside, it will walk like a dinosaur. 
 
 As comical as they sound, these experiments offer a rare chance to explore how extinct species like Tyrannosaurus rex might have moved. It is impossible to know for sure, of course, but palaeontologists had made some educated guesses - which are now closely matched by the gait of these stick-tailed chickens. 
 
 Image copyright Rodrigo Vasquez Image caption This chicken apparently walks a little like a T. Rex 
 
 "We cannot test it in a real T. rex or any theropod dinosaurs - but we can in a chicken," Dr Vasquez told the BBC. 
 
 "[The gait] is a little bit crouching and the steps are a bit longer, because the centre of gravity of the animal is changed… and they have to counterbalance the weight of the tail by stretching their neck a little bit." 
 
 He also said he was thrilled to be representing Chilean science at the award ceremony: "It's funny, but it's really good recognition." 
 
 Here is the full list of Ig Nobel prize winners: 
 
 Chemistry - Callum Ormonde (University of Western Australia) and colleagues, for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg. 
 
 Physics - Patricia Yang (Georgia Institute of Technology, US) and colleagues, for testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds). 
 
 Literature - Mark Dingemanse (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands) and colleagues, for discovering that the word "huh?" (or its equivalent) seems to exist in every human language - and for not being quite sure why. 
 
 Management - Gennaro Bernile (Singapore Management University) and colleagues, for discovering that many business leaders developed in childhood a fondness for risk-taking, when they experienced natural disasters (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and wildfires) that - for them - had no dire personal consequences. 
 
 Economics - The Bangkok Metropolitan Police (Thailand) for offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes. 
 
 Medicine - joint award: Hajime Kimata (Kimata Hajime Clinic, Japan) and also Jaroslava Durdiaková (Comenius University, Slovakia) and her collagues, for experiments to study the biomedical benefits or biomedical consequences of intense kissing (and other intimate, interpersonal activities). 
 
 Image copyright AP Image caption Paper planes are traditionally hurled at the stage during the Ig Nobel ceremony 
 
 Mathematics - Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer (University of Vienna, Austria) for trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children. 
 
 Biology - Bruno Grossi (University of Chile) and colleagues, for observing that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked. 
 
 Diagnostic medicine - Diallah Karim (Stoke Mandeville Hospital, UK) and colleagues, for determining that acute appendicitis can be accurately diagnosed by the amount of pain evident when the patient is driven over speed bumps. 
 
 Physiology and entomology - Awarded jointly to two individuals: Justin Schmidt (Southwest Biological Institute, US) for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects; and to Michael L. Smith (Cornell University, US), for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are the least painful (the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm). and which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft). 
 
 Follow Jonathan on Twitter
– Thursday night was the silliest night in scientists' calendars, and with winners including a man who wore prosthetic extensions to live among a herd of goats in the Alps for several days, this year's Ig Nobel awards did not disappoint. In front of a rowdy crowd, real Nobel winners handed out the awards to those who had the year's oddest research. Winners also received $10 trillion—in a single Zimbabwean banknote (US value: less than $1). Some highlights from the annual ceremony at Harvard University, which was presented by the Annals of Improbable Research: "Goat man" Tom Thwaites wore his goat legs to the awards ceremony .He tells the BBC that he gained a "goat buddy" during his time in the Alps—but there were some tense moments. "I was just sort of walking around, you know, chewing grass, and just looked up and then suddenly realized that everyone else had stopped chewing and there was this tension which I hadn't kind of noticed before and then one or two of the goats started tossing their horns around and I think I was about to get in a fight," he says. Thwaites shared the biology prize with Charles Foster, another Brit who has spent time living in the wild as, among other things, a badger, an otter, and a fox. Science reports that the medicine prize went to a team of neurologists and psychologists, who, with the help of video cameras, mirrors, and volunteers injected with a chemical that causes a mild itch, discovered that scratching the left side of your body will relieve an itch on the right side if you're looking in a mirror at the time. A Japanese team won the perception prize with a study published as "Perceived Size and Perceived Distance of Targets Viewed From Between the Legs: Evidence for Proprioceptive Theory." Their research involved bending over and looking at things from between their legs to see if they looked any different. Egyptian urologist Ahmed Shafik was posthumously awarded the reproduction prize for his research on how wearing trousers of polyester, cotton, or wool affected the sex lives of rats. The rats that wore polyester had the biggest drop in sexual activity, notes the Guardian. This year's Ig Nobel in chemistry went to Volkswagen, for "solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested." (Previous Ig Nobels have gone to scientists who swallowed parboiled dead shrews and a researcher who allowed bees to sting every part of his anatomy.)