Constipated scorpions, love at first sight inspire Ig Nobels

BOSTON (AP) — The sex lives of constipated scorpions, cute ducklings with an innate sense of physics, and a life-size rubber moose may not appear to have much in common, but they all inspired the winners of this year’s Ig Nobels, the prize for comical scientific achievement.

Held less than a month before the actual Nobel Prizes are announced, Thursday's 32nd annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony was for the third year in a row a prerecorded affair webcast on the Annals of Improbable Research magazine's website.

The winners, honored in 10 categories, also included scientists who found that when people on a blind date are attracted to each other, their heart rates synchronize, and researchers who looked at why legal documents can be so utterly baffling, even to lawyers themselves.

Even though the ceremony was prerecorded, it retained much of the fun of the live event usually held at Harvard University.

As has been an Ig Nobel tradition, real Nobel laureates handed out the prizes, using a bit of video trickery: The Nobel laureates handed the prize off screen, while the winners reached out and brought a prize they had been sent and self-assembled into view.

Winners also received a virtually worthless Zimbabwean $10 trillion bill.

Curiosity Ig-nited? Learn more about some of the winners:

GET YOUR DUCKS IN A ROW

“Science is fun. My sort of a tagline is you’re not doing science if you’re not having fun,” said Frank Fish, a biology professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania who shared the physics Ig Nobel for studying why ducklings follow their mothers in single-file formation.

It's about energy conservation: The ducklings are drafting, much like stock cars, cyclists and runners do in a race, he said.

“It all has to do with the flow that occurs behind that leading...