Marc Abrahams: I'm afraid I did. In 1990, I became the editor of a science magazine, which is a very long story. Suddenly, I was interviewing scientists and inventors and other people. I kept meeting people who've done these spectacular, funny, thought-provoking things and I kept realizing most of these people are not famous. Nobody knows who they are, and they probably are going to live their entire life, while nobody will know that they did these great things. I then realized that we could do something, we could do something small. So that was how the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony started. You must have a name for something if you're going to talk about it, there's a longer reason why we picked the name ‘Ig Noble Prize’, but mostly, we had to name it something kind of familiar. So that's that. I don't know if that makes sense, but... that's the answer.

C.W. (Kees) Moeliker: I did not measure it. I just took pictures, and it will always be a secret.

C.W. (Kees) Moeliker: There have been cases where pubic lice were found in armpit hair, but I think the hope is still in the beards and also in the in the eyelashes.

Jonathan Williams: Well, I guess… when I told our communications officer, I said: “Guess what? We've won an Ig Nobel Prize!” and she said: “Oh. I'm really sorry about that.” Then I said: “Wait, it's a good thing.” and she then read a little bit more and she realized indeed it's a great thing. And I can only recommend it, so go for it.

Mariska Kret: Actually, my PhD student says she was quite offended. Of course, she was the one doing most of the hard work, and now people are going to laugh about it. But then the best part is that people also start to think about it more. That’s the crucial aspect.

C.W. (Kees) Moeliker: The worst part of winning an Ig Noble Prize is that it's very hard to win a second Ig Nobel Prize.

Marc Abrahams: Nobody's ever asked a foolish question like that before. There are none. The only requirement is that you've done something that makes anyone anywhere in the world laugh and then think. That’s it.

C.W. (Kees) Moeliker: There were very few publications about it and in most of the publications, it's not known whether the victim or the partner was male or female. Because in some birds and mammals, you cannot see it from the outside. I was the first to actually document that it was homosexual necrophilia.

Marc Abrahams: There are several Danes that have gotten the Ig Noble Prize. One of them used to be living a few blocks away from where we're standing. He and his colleague study fish and other animals that live in the sea. They won an Ig Nobel Prize for discovering that herring apparently communicate by farting. There are other winners too.

Marc Abrahams: Yes, we gave an Ig Noble Prize to a British mathematician who studied exactly that. He studied the physics of what happens when you put butter on one side of toast and let it fall. He discovered that the physics say that more often than not, it will indeed land on the buttered side. He wrote a paper, published it and we gave him a prize. He then later did an experiment with, I think, about 10,000 British school children across Britain. They all had to drop buttered toast at the exact same time. He found that the numbers worked out very similar to what the calculation predicted.

Jonathan Williams: That's a good question. We did try to align some of the spikes with the ticker. You know there’s an Internet ticker of what is happening for example when there's a free kick… and sometimes it did line up, sometimes it did not. And I think part of the problem is the geometry of the stadium. We were just sitting in one corner, and of course, if the opposition team gets something positive they yell louder, and then ours yell again. So, there's a little bit of interference there. It's a hard one to sort out, but there must be some sort of connection.

Jonathan Williams: No, we didn't on that occasion. Because people will admit the same amount of CO2, we simply just ratio to the CO2, so that we would take care of any sub-fraction measurement of the crowd. But what I can say is that in a follow-up experiment, we were actually invited to the European Sex Research Institute. And there we looked at how breath chemistry changes when people are exposed to sort of erotic films. Here we saw that there is indeed a difference to the chemicals that males and females emit when they're exposed to such material. So, there are breath markers when you're sexually aroused.

Mariska Kret: It’s a difficult question to answer. Because they're never beating exactly at the same time. There's always one that's a little bit faster and one that's going behind. And this can also swap. There is of course variance. I mean some of the couples are more aligned than others, and that's how we correlate it.

Jonathan Williams: Oh, that's a good question. I like it. We haven't tried that. We could try a lying game where people have to try to deceive, and we could see whether we pick it up.

Mariska Kret: Yes, that's a big problem. We have to disappoint some of the females in that case. But it's likely. I mean, some guys are probably just going to be more popular. We also have personality that matters. They're not all the same.

Marc Abrahams: First of all, if you were going to try to answer that question, how would you do it? What they found after looking at a number of dead bodies was essentially ‘yes’. They said, in all the bodies they looked at, most of them had about 100 hairs, a little more than that, in each nostril, and there was not much difference between one nostril and the other.