Ig Nobel prize: 'Goat man' wins silly science award

A man who spent three days in the Swiss Alps living as a mountain goat has received an Ig Nobel prize for the silliest scientific research.

Thomas Thwaites, 35, from London, strapped himself into prosthetic legs that enabled him to move like a goat for the project, which he described as "a holiday from being human".

While he recalled his time as a goat fondly, particularly bonding with a "goat buddy", he conceded that the whole idea was "bizarre."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Thwaites shared his biology prize with another Brit with a penchant for animal role-play. Charles Foster, a fellow at the University of Oxford, spent months living like as a variety of animals and was even chased by bloodhounds while mimicking a deer, according to Phys.org.

The Ig Nobel awards were inspired by the US science humour magazine, the Annals of Improbable Research, and have been handed out annually in a ceremony at Harvard University for 26 years. Winners receive $10trn – unfortunately, that's Zimbabwean dollars, which are currently almost worthless.

Although the experiments might sound ridiculous – and, in the case of the "goat man", look ridiculous too - "a lot of it - when examined closely - is actually intended to tackle real-world problems", the BBC reports.

How do you find out who wears in the trousers in a family of rats? Egyptian urologist Dr Ahmed Shafik set out to answer the question, managing to wrangle rodents into cotton, wool and cotton-polyester blend trousers "in order to study the garments' effects on their sex lives", the Daily Telegraph reports.

His conclusion – that the rats wearing polyester were less sexually active – is unlikely to alter the face of science, but it did earn Shafik an Ig Nobel prize.

Other winners at Thursday night's ceremony were a team of economists who studied the personality traits volunteers ascribed to different coloured rocks and a Swedish man who penned three novels about his passion for collecting hoverflies.