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Akira Horiuchi, winner of this year’s Ig Nobel for medical education, demonstrates his self-colonoscopy technique during this year’s award ceremony

From workplace voodoo dolls and self-inflicted colonoscopies to cannibalistic diets and using roller coasters to pass kidney stones, here are the winners of this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes.

It’s that time of year again, when some of the strangest science gets its turn to shine. To be clear, the Ig Nobel Prizes aren’t meant to diminish or demean scientific work, nor do they recognize dubious or bad science. Rather, it’s an opportunity to highlight some of the weirder work that gets done in research labs around the world, or scientific work that, quite frankly, is fucking hilarious. The tagline from the group behind the Ig Nobel Prize, Improbable Research, says it best: “Research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.”…

More on the ceremony at “Solo Colonoscopies, Cannibal Calories, and More 2018 Ig Nobel Prize Winners.”  See the complete, official run-down of laureates and their work at “The 2018 Ig Nobel Prize Winners.”

* Zora Neale Hurston

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As we pursue knowledge, we might recall that it was on this date in 1721 that The Boston Globe announced the arrival of the first camel to the United States: “Just arrived from Africa, a very large Camel being above Seven Foot high, and Twelve Foot long, and is the first of its Kind ever brought into America to be seen at the bottom of Cold Lane where daily Attendance is given.”

The first commercial importation of a number of camels into the U.S. was made in 1856  for military purposes (in the desert West), following an appropriation of $30,000 made by Congress in 1855.

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