THE hotly anticipated winners of this year's Ig Nobel awards have been announced, with the ceremony demonstrating some amazing strides forward in human scientific knowledge.
The awards celebrate Improbable Research, with studies making the grade this year including proof that narcissists prefer bushy eyebrows ("Eyebrows Cue Grandiose Narcissism") as well as a study of a knife made from human feces ("Experimental Replication Shows Knives Manufactured from Frozen Human Feces Do Not Work").
Economic research included a study of osculation across the globe, aiming to quantify the relationship between income inequality and the average amount of mouth-to-mouth kissing in various countries.
An intriguing report in the field of entomology won an Ig Nobel for its finding that people who study insects are actually disproportionately afraid of spiders, while the Ig Nobel for medicine went to the researchers who formally identified the new medical condition called misophonia, which is "distress at hearing other people make chewing sounds".
An Ig Nobel for Medical Education went to the leaders of the USA, UK, Brazil, India, Mexico, Turkey, Russia and Turkmenistan "for using the COVID-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can".
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