In the news: "Why it's perfectly normal to see Jesus in toast." WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Justin Schmidt and Michael Smith 
 
 The 2014 Ig Nobel Prize Winners 
 
 The 2014 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 18th, 2014 at the 24th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. Here's the full list of this year's Ig Nobel Prizes: 
 
 Physics: Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that's on the floor. 147-151. 
 
 WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Kiyoshi Mabuchi 
 
 NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE [CHINA, CANADA]: Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Kang Lee 
 
 PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [UK, FINLAND, AUSTRALIA, USA]: Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, for amassing evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative, and more psychopathic than people who habitually arise early in the morning. 538-541. 
 
 WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Peter Jonason 
 
 PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [CZECH REPUBLIC, JAPAN, USA, INDIA]: Jaroslav Flegr, Jan Havlíček and Jitka Hanušova-Lindova, and to David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan, Lisa Seyfried, for investigating whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat. WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Jaroslav Flegr, David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan 
 
 BIOLOGY PRIZE [CZECH REPUBLIC, GERMANY, ZAMBIA]: Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nováková, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladimír Hanzal, Miloš Ježek, Tomáš Kušta, Veronika Němcová, Jana Adámková, Kateřina Benediktová, Jaroslav Červený and Hynek Burda, for carefully documenting that when dogs defecate and urinate, they prefer to align their body axis with Earth's north-south geomagnetic field lines. REFERENCE: "Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth's magnetic field," Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nováková, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladimír Hanzal, Miloš Ježek, Tomáš Kušta, Veronika Němcová, Jana Adámková, Kateřina Benediktová, Jaroslav Červený and Hynek Burda, Frontiers in Zoology, 10:80, 27 December 27, 2013. 
 
 WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nováková, Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Veronika Němcová, Hynek Burda 
 
 ART PRIZE [ITALY]: Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea, for measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather than a pretty painting, while being shot [in the hand] by a powerful laser beam. 1152-1162. 
 
 WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Marina de Tommaso 
 
 ECONOMICS PRIZE [ITALY]: ISTAT — the Italian government's National Institute of Statistics, for proudly taking the lead in fulfilling the European Union mandate for each country to increase the official size of its national economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling, and all other unlawful financial transactions between willing participants. REFERENCE: "Cambia il Sistema europeo dei conti nazionali e regionali - Sec2010", ISTAT, 2014. MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, INDIA]: Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, for treating "uncontrollable" nosebleeds, using the method of nasal-packing-with-strips-of-cured-pork. REFERENCE: "Nasal Packing With Strips of Cured Pork as Treatment for Uncontrollable Epistaxis in a Patient with Glanzmann Thrombasthenia," Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology, vol. 732-36. 
 
 WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Sonal Saraiya 
 
 ARCTIC SCIENCE PRIZE [NORWAY, GERMANY, USA, CANADA]: Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl, for testing how reindeer react to seeing humans who are disguised as polar bears. Nutrition: Raquel Rubio, Anna Jofré, Belén Martín, Teresa Aymerich and Margarita Garriga, for their study titled "Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages." It's not the recommended therapy, but one of the winners of the Ig Nobel Prize for medicine, Sonal Saraiya, told The Associated Press that "we had to do some out-of-the-box thinking." Nobel Laureates William Lipscomb, Robert Laughlin and Dudley Herschbach can be seen here analyzing Mr. Meyer's speech. Scientific references: Fleger and Havlicek, Fleger et al., Hanauer et al. Some of the winners go on to win honest-to-goodness Nobels — such as the University of Manchester's Andrei Geim, who won an Ig Nobel for his work with levitating frogs and then shared the 2010 Nobel Prize for physics, thanks to his work with graphene. The Ig Nobels are traditionally given out during the buildup to the real Nobel Prize announcements, under the auspices of a humor magazine called the Annals of Improbable Research. The physicians remembered that, and discovered that the remedy really, really worked, thanks to clotting factors in the pork as well as the salt's tendency to draw out fluids from the nose. "Every winner has done something that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think," said Marc Abrahams, the magazine's editor and impresario for the event.
– More than 1,000 people gathered at Harvard's Sanders Theatre yesterday to celebrate the 24th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, which includes such traditions as throwing paper airplanes and seeing who wins a date with a Nobel laureate. But the real treat is the science itself—which, in addition to being funny or preposterous, can also be extremely useful; it's not unheard of for someone who wins an Ig Nobel to go on to win an actual Nobel Prize, reports NBC News. (There is, for instance, the University of Manchester's Andre Geim, who both claimed an Ig Nobel for studying levitating frogs and later a Nobel for physics due to his research on graphene.) Here's a quick list of some of the highlights from the 2014 Ig Nobel winners: The Physics prize goes to a team that measured the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin and then a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that's on the floor. The Neuroscience prize goes to a team that attempted to dissect the inner workings of the brains of people who see Jesus in their toast. The Biology prize goes to a team that discovered when dogs poop and pee, they tend to align their body axis with Earth's north-south geomagnetic field lines. The Medicine prize goes to a team that was able to treat "uncontrollable" nosebleeds using strips of cured pork. The Arctic Science prize goes to a team that observed how reindeer behave upon seeing humans disguised as polar bears. (Check out last year's winners, which involved swallowing a parboiled dead shrew whole and outlining the best ways to surgically remove a penis as long as it hasn't been chomped by a duck.)