THE 2010 IG NOBEL AWARDS have been presented. The Ig Nobel Awards honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative—and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.

My personal favorites are the engineering prize, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot using a remote-control helicopter, and the management prize, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.