1991|Biology|Robert Klark Graham developed the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank that accepts donations only from Nobel laureates and Olympians.
1991|Chemistry|Jacques Benveniste for his persistent "discovery" that water is an intelligent liquid able to remember events long after all traces of those events have vanished.
1991|Economics|Michael Milken, father of the junk bond.
1991|Education|Dan Quayle, US Vice President at the time, for demonstrating better than anyone else the need for science education.
1991|Literature|Erich von Däniken for explaining how human civilization was influenced by ancient astronauts from outer space.
1991|Medicine|Alan Kligerman, inventor of Beano, for his pioneering work with anti-gas liquids that prevent bloat, gassiness, discomfort, and embarrassment.
1991|Peace|Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, for his lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it.
1991|Chance|John Cage for popularizing chance music.
1992|Archaeology|Éclaireurs de France for damaging the prehistoric paintings of two bisons in the Cave of Mayrière supérieure near Bruniquel, France, while removing graffiti.
1992|Art|Jim Knowlton for his anatomy poster "Penises of the Animal Kingdom," and the US National Endowment for the Arts for encouraging him to extend his work into a pop-up book.
1992|Biology|Dr Cecil Jacobson for devising a simple, single-handed method of "quality control" as a relentlessly generous sperm donor.
1992|Chemistry|Ivette Bassa for her role in the crowning achievement of 20th century chemistry: the synthesis of bright blue Jell-O.
1992|Economics|The investors of Lloyd's of London for their bold attempt to ensure disaster by refusing to pay for their company's losses.
1992|Literature|Yuri Struchkov for the 948 scientific papers he published between 1981 and 1990, averaging more than one every 3.9 days.
1992|Medicine|F. Kanda and colleagues at the Shiseido Research Center for their research concluding that people who think they have foot odor do, and those who don't, don't.
1992|Nutrition|The utilizers of SPAM for 54 years of undiscriminating digestion.
1992|Peace|Daryl Gates, former police chief of Los Angeles, for his uniquely compelling methods of bringing people together.
1992|Physics|David Chorley and Doug Bower for their circular contributions to field theory based on the geometrical destruction of English crops (crop circles).
1993|Biology|Paul Williams Jr. and Kenneth W. Newel for their pioneering study "Salmonella Excretion in Joy-Riding Pigs."
1993|Chemistry|James and Gaines Campbell for inventing scent strips, the odious method by which perfume is applied to magazine pages.
1993|Consumer Engineering|Ron Popeil for redefining the industrial revolution with devices such as the Veg-O-Matic, the Pocket Fisherman, Mr. Microphone, and the Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler.
1993|Economics|Ravi Batra for selling enough copies of his books predicting the Great Depression of 1990 to single-handedly prevent worldwide economic collapse.
1993|Literature|T. Morrison and 972 co-authors for publishing a medical research paper that has one hundred times as many authors as pages.
1993|Mathematics|Robert W. Faid for calculating the exact odds (710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1) that Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist.
1993|Medicine|James F. Nolan and colleagues for their painstaking research report "Acute Management of the Zipper-Entrapped Penis."
1993|Peace|The Pepsi-Cola Company of the Philippines for sponsoring a contest, announcing the wrong winning number, thereby inciting 800,000 riotously expectant winners.
1993|Physics|Corentin Louis Kervran for his conclusion that the calcium in chickens' eggshells is created by a process of cold fusion.
1993|Psychology|John E. Mack and David M. Jacobs for their conclusion that people who believe they were kidnapped by aliens from outer space probably were.
1993|Visionary Technology|Jay Schiffman for inventing AutoVision, a device that makes it possible to drive a car and watch television at the same time, and the Michigan State Legislature for making it legal.
1994|Biology|W. Brian Sweeney and colleagues for their study "The Constipated Serviceman: Prevalence Among Deployed US Troops."
1994|Chemistry|Texas State Senator Bob Glasgow for sponsoring a law which makes it illegal to purchase beakers, flasks, test tubes, or other laboratory glassware without a permit.
1994|Economics|Juan Pablo Dávila for accidentally instructing his computer to "buy" when he meant "sell," ultimately losing 0.5 percent of Chile's GNP, inspiring a new verb "davilar" meaning "to botch things up royally."
1994|Entomology|Robert A. Lopez for obtaining ear mites from cats, inserting them into his own ear, and carefully observing and analyzing the results.
1994|Literature|L. Ron Hubbard for his book Dianetics, founding father of Scientology.
1994|Mathematics|The Southern Baptist Church of Alabama for their county-by-county estimate of how many Alabama citizens will go to Hell if they don't repent.
1994|Medicine|Patient X for his determined use of electroshock therapy on his rattlesnake bite by attaching automobile spark plug wires to his lip, and to the doctors who documented the failure.
1994|Peace|John Hagelin for his experimental conclusion that 4,000 trained meditators caused a 24 percent decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C.
1994|Psychology|Lee Kuan Yew for his thirty-year study of the effects of punishing three million citizens of Singapore whenever they spat, chewed gum, or fed pigeons.
1995|Chemistry|Bijan Pakzad for creating DNA Cologne and DNA Perfume, neither of which contain deoxyribonucleic acid, and both of which come in a triple helix bottle.
1995|Dentistry|Robert H. Beaumont for his incisive study "Patient Preference for Waxed or Unwaxed Dental Floss."
1995|Economics|Nick Leeson and his superiors at Barings Bank and Robert Citron of Orange County for using the calculus of derivatives to demonstrate that every financial institution has its limits.
1995|Literature|David B. Busch and James R. Starling for their research report "Rectal Foreign Bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World's Literature."
1995|Medicine|Marcia E. Buebel and colleagues for their study "The Effects of Unilateral Forced Nostril Breathing on Cognition."
1995|Nutrition|John Martinez for luak coffee, the world's most expensive coffee, made from coffee beans ingested and excreted by a raccoon-like animal native to Indonesia.
1995|Peace|The Legislative Yuan of Taiwan for demonstrating that politicians gain more by punching, kicking and gouging each other than by waging war against other nations.
1995|Physics|Dominique M.R. Georget and colleagues for their rigorous analysis of soggy breakfast cereal.
1995|Psychology|Shigeru Watanabe and colleagues for their success in training pigeons to discriminate between the paintings of Picasso and those of Monet.
1995|Public Health|Martha Kold Bakkevig and Ruth Nielsen for their exhaustive study "Impact of Wet Underwear on Thermoregulatory Responses and Thermal Comfort in the Cold."
1996|Art|Don Featherstone for his ornamentally evolutionary invention, the plastic pink flamingo.
1996|Biodiversity|Chonosuke Okamura for discovering fossils of dinosaurs, horses, dragons, and more than one thousand other extinct "mini-species" each less than 0.25 mm in length.
1996|Biology|Anders Bærheim and Hogne Sandvik for their report "Effect of Ale, Garlic, and Soured Cream on the Appetite of Leeches."
1996|Chemistry|George Goble for his blistering world record time for igniting a barbecue grill: three seconds, using charcoal and liquid oxygen.
1996|Economics|Dr. Robert J. Genco for his discovery that "financial strain is a risk indicator for destructive periodontal disease."
1996|Literature|The editors of the journal Social Text for publishing a paper composed under deceptive pretenses arguing about the nature of gravity using academic buzzwords (the Sokal Affair).
1996|Medicine|Seven tobacco company executives for their unshakable discovery, as testified to the US Congress, that nicotine is not addictive.
1996|Peace|Jacques Chirac, President of France, for commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic bomb tests in the Pacific.
1996|Physics|Robert Matthews for his demonstration that the buttered toast phenomenon is ultimately based in the fundamental physical constants.
1996|Public Health|Ellen Kleist and Harald Moi for their cautionary medical report "Transmission of Gonorrhea Through an Inflatable Doll."
1997|Astronomy|Richard C. Hoagland for identifying artificial features on the Moon and on Mars, including a human face on Mars and ten-mile high buildings on the far side of the Moon.
1997|Biology|T. Yagyu and colleagues for measuring people's brainwave patterns while they chewed different flavors of gum.
1997|Communications|Sanford Wallace, president of Cyber Promotions, for delivering electronic junk mail to all the world.
1997|Economics|Akihiro Yokoi and Aki Maita for diverting millions of man-hours of work into the husbandry of virtual pets (Tamagotchi).
1997|Entomology|Mark Hostetler for his book "That Gunk on Your Car," which identifies the insect splats that appear on automobile windows.
1997|Literature|Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, Yoav Rosenberg, and Michael Drosnin for their claimed statistical discovery of a hidden code in the Bible.
1997|Medicine|Carl J. Charnetski, Francis X. Brennan Jr., and James F. Harrison for their discovery that listening to Muzak stimulates the immune system and may help prevent the common cold.
1997|Meteorology|Bernard Vonnegut for his report "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed."
1997|Peace|Harold Hillman for his report "The Possible Pain Experienced During Execution by Different Methods."
1997|Physics|John Bockris for his achievements in cold fusion, the transmutation of base elements into gold, and the electrochemical incineration of domestic rubbish.
1998|Chemistry|Jacques Benveniste for his homeopathic "discovery" that water has memory, and that the information can be transmitted over telephone lines and the Internet.
1998|Biology|Peter Fong for contributing to the happiness of clams by giving them Prozac.
1998|Economics|Richard Seed for his efforts to stoke up the world economy by cloning himself and other human beings.
1998|Literature|Dr. Mara Sidoli for her illuminating report "Farting as a Defence Against Unspeakable Dread."
1998|Medicine|Patient Y and his doctors for the cautionary medical report "A Man Who Pricked His Finger and Smelled Putrid for 5 Years."
1998|Peace|Prime Minister of India Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif for their aggressively peaceful detonations of atomic bombs.
1998|Physics|Deepak Chopra for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.
1998|Safety Engineering|Troy Hurtubise for developing and personally testing a suit of armor that is impervious to grizzly bears.
1998|Science Education|Dolores Krieger for demonstrating the merits of therapeutic touch, a method by which nurses manipulate the energy fields of ailing patients by carefully avoiding physical contact with those patients.
1998|Statistics|Jerald Bain and Kerry Siminoski for their carefully measured report "The Relationship Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size."
1999|Biology|Dr. Paul Bosland for breeding a spiceless jalapeño chili pepper.
1999|Chemistry|Takeshi Makino for his involvement with S-Check, an infidelity detection spray that wives can apply to their husbands' underwear.
1999|Environmental Protection|Hyuk-ho Kwon for inventing the self-perfuming business suit.
1999|Literature|The British Standards Institution for its six-page specification of the proper way to make a cup of tea.
1999|Managed Health Care|George and Charlotte Blonsky for inventing a device that aids women in giving birth by strapping them onto a circular table and rotating it at high speed.
1999|Medicine|Arvid Vatle for carefully collecting, classifying, and contemplating which kinds of containers his patients chose when submitting urine samples.
1999|Peace|Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong for inventing the Blaster, a foot-pedal activated flamethrower that motorists can use against carjackers.
1999|Physics|Len Fisher for calculating the optimal way to dunk a biscuit, and Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck and Joseph Keller for calculating how to make a teapot spout that does not drip.
1999|Science Education|The Kansas State Board of Education and the Colorado State Board of Education for mandating that children should not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution.
1999|Sociology|Steve Penfold for doing his PhD thesis on the history of Canadian doughnut shops.
2000|Biology|Richard Wassersug for his firsthand report "On the Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica."
2000|Chemistry|Donatella Marazziti and colleagues for their discovery that, biochemically, romantic love may be indistinguishable from having severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.
2000|Computer Science|Chris Niswander for inventing PawSense, software that detects when a cat is walking across your computer keyboard.
2000|Economics|The Reverend Sun Myung Moon for bringing efficiency and steady growth to the mass marriage industry.
2000|Literature|Jasmuheen for her book Living on Light, which explains that although some people do eat food, they don't ever really need to.
2000|Medicine|Willibrord Weijmar Schultz and colleagues for their illuminating report "Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal."
2000|Peace|The Royal Navy for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells and to instead just shout "Bang!"
2000|Physics|Andre Geim and Michael Berry for using magnets to levitate a frog. (Geim later won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for graphene research.)
2000|Psychology|David Dunning and Justin Kruger for their report "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments."
2000|Public Health|Jonathan Wyatt, Gordon McNaughton, and William Tullett for their alarming report "The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow."
2001|Astrophysics|Jack and Rexella Van Impe for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell.
2001|Biology|Buck Weimer for inventing Under-Ease, airtight underwear with a replaceable charcoal filter for bad-smelling gas.
2001|Economics|Joel Slemrod and Wojciech Kopczuk for their conclusion that people find a way to postpone their deaths if that will qualify them for a lower inheritance tax.
2001|Literature|John Richards for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural and possessive uses of the apostrophe.
2001|Medicine|Peter Barss for his impactful medical report "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts."
2001|Peace|Viliumas Malinauskus for creating the amusement park known as Stalin World.
2001|Physics|David Schmidt for his partial solution to the question of why shower curtains billow inwards.
2001|Psychology|Lawrence W. Sherman for his influential research report "An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children."
2001|Public Health|Chittaranjan Andrade and B. S. Srihari for their probing medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among adolescents.
2001|Technology|John Keogh for patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and the Australian Patent Office for granting him the patent.
2002|Biology|Norma Bubier and colleagues for their report "Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain."
2002|Chemistry|Theodore Gray for gathering many elements of the periodic table and assembling them into the shape of a periodic table.
2002|Economics|The executives of Enron, Lernaut & Hauspie, and other companies for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world.
2002|Hygiene|Eduardo Segura for inventing a washing machine for cats and dogs.
2002|Interdisciplinary Research|Karl Kruszelnicki for performing a comprehensive survey of human belly button lint — who gets it, when, and how much.
2002|Literature|Vicki Silvers Gier and David S. Kreiner for their colorful report "The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension."
2002|Mathematics|K.P. Sreekumar and G. Nirmalan for their analytical report "Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants."
2002|Medicine|Chris McManus for his excruciatingly balanced report "Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture."
2002|Peace|Keita Sato, Matsumi Suzuki, and Norio Kogure for promoting peace and harmony between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual, a dog-to-human language translation device.
2002|Physics|Arnd Leike for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay.
2003|Biology|C. W. Moeliker for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.
2003|Chemistry|Yukio Hirose for his chemical investigation of a bronze statue in the city of Kanazawa that fails to attract pigeons.
2003|Economics|Karl Schwärzler and the nation of Liechtenstein for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions and events.
2003|Engineering|John Paul Stapp, Edward A. Murphy Jr., and George Nichols for jointly giving birth in 1949 to Murphy's Law: "If anything can go wrong, it will."
2003|Interdisciplinary Research|Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson, and Magnus Enquist for their report "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans."
2003|Literature|John Trinkaus for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports on things that annoyed him.
2003|Medicine|Eleanor Maguire and colleagues for presenting evidence that the brains of London taxi drivers are more highly developed than those of other people.
2003|Peace|Lal Bihari for leading an active life even though he was declared legally dead, and for founding the Association of Dead People.
2003|Physics|Jack Harvey and colleagues for their irresistible report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces."
2003|Psychology|Gian Vittorio Caprara, Claudio Barbaranelli, and Philip Zimbardo for their discerning report "Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities."
2004|Biology|Ben Wilson and colleagues for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting.
2004|Chemistry|The Coca-Cola Company of Great Britain for using advanced technology to convert ordinary tap water into Dasani, a product that was later recalled due to contamination.
2004|Economics|The Vatican for outsourcing prayers to India.
2004|Engineering|Donald J. Smith and Frank J. Smith for patenting the combover (hairstyle).
2004|Literature|The American Nudist Research Library of Kissimmee, Florida for preserving nudist history so that everyone can see it.
2004|Medicine|Steven Stack and James Gundlach for their published report "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide."
2004|Peace|Daisuke Inoue for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.
2004|Physics|Ramesh Balasubramaniam and Michael Turvey for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping.
2004|Psychology|Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else.
2004|Public Health|Jillian Clarke for investigating the scientific validity of the Five-Second Rule about whether it is safe to eat food that has been dropped on the floor.
2005|Agricultural History|James Watson for his scholarly study "The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley's Exploding Trousers."
2005|Biology|Benjamin Smith and colleagues for painstakingly smelling and cataloging the peculiar odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were threatened.
2005|Chemistry|Edward Cussler and Brian Gettelfinger for conducting a careful experiment to settle the longstanding scientific question of whether people can swim faster in syrup or water.
2005|Economics|Gauri Nanda for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people get out of bed and don't fall back asleep.
2005|Fluid Dynamics|Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow and Jozsef Gal for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin when it defecates.
2005|Literature|The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria for creating and distributing a bold series of short stories (the advance-fee fraud emails).
2005|Medicine|Gregg A. Miller for inventing Neuticles — artificial replacement testicles for dogs, which are available in three sizes and three degrees of firmness.
2005|Nutrition|Yoshiro Nakamatsu for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years.
2005|Peace|Claire Rind and Peter Simmons for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from Star Wars.
2005|Physics|John Mainstone and Thomas Parnell for patiently conducting an experiment that began in 1927 in which a glob of black tar has been slowly dripping through a funnel (the Pitch Drop Experiment).
2006|Acoustics|D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake, and James Hillenbrand for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.
2006|Biology|Bart Knols and Ruurd de Jong for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.
2006|Chemistry|Antonio Mulet, José Javier Benedito, and José Bon for their study "Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature."
2006|Literature|Daniel Oppenheimer for his report "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly."
2006|Mathematics|Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.
2006|Medicine|Francis M. Fesmire for his medical case report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage."
2006|Nutrition|Wasmia Al-Houty and Faten Al-Mussalam for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.
2006|Ornithology|Ivan R. Schwab and Philip R.A. May for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.
2006|Peace|Howard Stapleton for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant — a device that makes an unpleasant noise audible only to teenagers.
2006|Physics|Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces.
2007|Aviation|Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano, and Diego A. Golombek for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
2007|Biology|Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns, and fungi that live in a typical bed.
2007|Chemistry|Mayu Yamamoto for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring — from cow dung.
2007|Economics|Kuo Cheng Hsieh for patenting a device that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
2007|Linguistics|Juan Manuel Toro and colleagues for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
2007|Literature|Glenda Browne for her study of the word "the" and of the many ways it causes problems for indexers who alphabetize things.
2007|Medicine|Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."
2007|Nutrition|Brian Wansink for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling soup bowl.
2007|Peace|Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio for instigating research on a chemical weapon — a "gay bomb" — that would cause enemy soldiers to become sexually attracted to each other.
2007|Physics|L. Mahadevan and Enrique Cerda Villablanca for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
2008|Archaeology|Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino for measuring how the course of history is affected by the movements of teeth through soil.
2008|Biology|Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.
2008|Chemistry|Sharee A. Umpierre and colleagues for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and Chuang-Ye Hong and colleagues for discovering that it is not.
2008|Cognitive Science|Toshiyuki Nakagaki and colleagues for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles.
2008|Economics|Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur, and Brent Jordan for discovering that professional lap dancers earn higher tips when they are ovulating.
2008|Literature|David Sims for his lovingly written study "You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations."
2008|Medicine|Dan Ariely and colleagues for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine.
2008|Nutrition|Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing it believe the chip was crisper and fresher than it really was.
2008|Peace|The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.
2008|Physics|Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.
2009|Biology|Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.
2009|Chemistry|Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño for creating diamonds from liquid — specifically from tequila.
2009|Economics|The directors and auditors of four Icelandic banks for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa.
2009|Literature|Ireland's police service for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent parking violator in the country — Prawo Jazdy — who is Polish for "driving licence."
2009|Mathematics|Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers by printing bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars.
2009|Medicine|Donald L. Unger for investigating a possible cause of arthritis by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand every day for more than sixty years while leaving those of his right hand uncracked.
2009|Peace|Stephan Bolliger and colleagues for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
2009|Physics|Katherine K. Whitcome, Daniel E. Lieberman, and Liza J. Shapiro for analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over.
2009|Public Health|Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan for inventing a brassiere that in an emergency can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks.
2009|Veterinary Medicine|Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.
2010|Biology|Libiao Zhang and colleagues for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats.
2010|Chemistry|Eric Adams, Scott Socolofsky, Stephen Masutani, and British Petroleum for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix.
2010|Economics|The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and others for creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a region thereof.
2010|Engineering|Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and colleagues for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.
2010|Management|Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.
2010|Medicine|Simon Rietveld and Ilja van Beest for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.
2010|Peace|Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.
2010|Physics|Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.
2010|Public Health|Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor for determining by experiment that microbes cling to bearded scientists.
2010|Transportation Planning|Toshiyuki Nakagaki and colleagues for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.
2011|Biology|Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle.
2011|Chemistry|Makoto Imai and colleagues for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency.
2011|Literature|John Perry for his Theory of Structured Procrastination: to be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.
2011|Mathematics|Dorothy Martin, Pat Robertson, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Lee Jang Rim, Credonia Mwerinde, and Harold Camping for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and for teaching the world to be very careful when making predictions that do not come true.
2011|Medicine|Mirjam Tuk and colleagues for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things when they have a strong urge to urinate.
2011|Peace|Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armoured military vehicle.
2011|Psychology|Karl Halvor Teigen for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.
2011|Physics|Philippe Perrin and colleagues for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.
2011|Physiology|Anna Wilkinson and colleagues for their study "No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise."
2011|Public Safety|John Senders for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flips down over the face, blocking vision.
2012|Acoustics|Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada for creating the SpeechJammer — a machine that disrupts a person's speech by making them hear their own spoken words at a slight delay.
2012|Anatomy|Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.
2012|Chemistry|Johan Pettersson for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people's hair turned green.
2012|Fluid Dynamics|Rouslan Krechetnikov and Hans Mayer for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.
2012|Literature|The US Government General Accountability Office for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.
2012|Medicine|Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.
2012|Neuroscience|Craig Bennett and colleagues for demonstrating that brain researchers, using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can find meaningful brain activity almost anywhere — even in a dead salmon.
2012|Peace|The SKN Company for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.
2012|Physics|Joseph Keller, Raymond Goldstein, Patrick Warren, and Robin Ball for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.
2012|Psychology|Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan, and Tulio Guadalupe for their study "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller."
2013|Archaeology|Brian Crandall and Peter Stahl for parboiling a dead shrew, swallowing the shrew without chewing, and then carefully examining what eventually came out the other end.
2013|Biology and Astronomy|Marie Dacke and colleagues for discovering that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way.
2013|Chemistry|Shinsuke Imai and colleagues for discovering that the biochemical process by which onions make people cry is more complicated than scientists previously realized.
2013|Medicine|Masateru Uchiyama and colleagues for assessing the effect of listening to opera on heart transplant patients who are mice.
2013|Peace|Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, and the Belarus State Police for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.
2013|Probability|Bert Tolkamp and colleagues for making two related discoveries: first, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely it is to stand up next; and second, once a cow stands up, you cannot predict how soon it will lie down again.
2013|Physics|Alberto Minetti and colleagues for discovering that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond — if those people and that pond were on the moon.
2013|Psychology|Laurent Bègue and colleagues for confirming, by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they are more attractive.
2013|Public Health|Kasian Bhanganada and colleagues for the medical techniques described in their report "Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam."
2013|Safety Engineering|Gustano Pizzo for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers — the system drops the hijacker through a trap door, seals him in a package, and drops the package out of the airplane.
2014|Arctic Science|Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl for testing how reindeer react to seeing humans who are disguised as polar bears.
2014|Art|Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea for measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather than a pretty painting, while being shot by a powerful laser.
2014|Biology|Vlastimil Hart and colleagues for carefully documenting that when dogs defecate and urinate, they prefer to align their body axis with Earth's north-south geomagnetic field lines.
2014|Economics|Italian National Institute of Statistics for proudly taking the lead in fulfilling the European Union mandate for each country to include illegal activities in their gross domestic product.
2014|Medicine|Ian Humphreys and colleagues for treating "uncontrollable" nosebleeds using the method of nasal-packing-with-strips-of-cured-pork.
2014|Neuroscience|Jiangang Liu and colleagues for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.
2014|Nutrition|Raquel Rubio and colleagues for their study titled "Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Feces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages."
2014|Physics|Kiyoshi Mabuchi and colleagues for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that's on the floor.
2014|Psychology|Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons for amassing evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative, and more psychopathic than people who habitually arise early.
2014|Public Health|Jaroslav Flegr and colleagues for investigating whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat.
2015|Biology|Bruno Grossi and colleagues for observing that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that of dinosaurs.
2015|Chemistry|Callum Ormonde and colleagues for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg.
2015|Diagnostic Medicine|Diallah Karim and colleagues for determining that acute appendicitis can be accurately diagnosed by the amount of pain a patient feels when the patient is driven over speed bumps.
2015|Economics|The Bangkok Metropolitan Police for offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes.
2015|Literature|Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira, and Nick J. Enfield for discovering that the word "huh?" (or its equivalent) seems to exist in every human language, and for not being entirely sure why.
2015|Management|Gennaro Bernile, Vineet Bhagwat, and P. Raghavendra Rau for discovering that many business leaders developed, during childhood, a fondness for risk-taking because they had survived potentially life-threatening natural disasters.
2015|Mathematics|Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer for trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed to father 888 children.
2015|Medicine|Hajime Kimata for experiments to study the biomedical benefits or biomedical consequences of kissing (and other intimate acts).
2015|Physics|Patricia Yang, David Hu, and colleagues for testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds.
2015|Physiology and Entomology|Justin Schmidt for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain of 78 bee, wasp, and ant stings; and Michael L. Smith for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body.
2016|Reproduction|Ahmed Shafik for studying the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats.
2016|Economics|Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective.
2016|Physics|Gábor Horváth and colleagues for discovering why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses, and for discovering why dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones.
2016|Chemistry|Volkswagen for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the car is being tested.
2016|Medicine|Christoph Helmchen and colleagues for discovering that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body (and vice versa).
2016|Psychology|Evelyne Debey and colleagues for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe the answers.
2016|Peace|Gordon Pennycook and colleagues for their scholarly study "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit."
2016|Biology|Charles Foster for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and Thomas Thwaites for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming among, goats.
2016|Literature|Fredrik Sjöberg for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead.
2016|Perception|Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs.
2017|Physics|Marc-Antoine Fardin for using fluid dynamics to probe the question "Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?"
2017|Peace|Milo Puhan and colleagues for demonstrating that regular playing of a didgeridoo is an effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnea and snoring.
2017|Economics|Matthew Rockloff and Nancy Greer for their experiments to see how contact with a live crocodile affects a person's willingness to gamble.
2017|Anatomy|James Heathcote for his medical research study "Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?"
2017|Biology|Kazunori Yoshizawa and colleagues for their discovery of a female penis, and a male vagina, in a cave insect.
2017|Fluid Dynamics|Jiwon Han for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing to learn what happens when a person walks backwards while carrying a cup of coffee.
2017|Nutrition|Fernanda Ito, Enrico Bernard, and Rodrigo Torres for the first scientific report of human blood in the diet of the hairy-legged vampire bat.
2017|Medicine|Jean-Pierre Royet and colleagues for using advanced brain-scanning technology to measure the extent to which some people are disgusted by cheese.
2017|Cognition|Matteo Martini and colleagues for demonstrating that many identical twins cannot tell themselves apart visually.
2017|Obstetrics|Marisa López-Teijón and colleagues for showing that a developing human fetus responds more strongly to music that is played electromechanically inside the mother's vagina than to music that is played outside the mother's belly.
2018|Medicine|Marc Mitchell and David Wartinger for using roller coaster rides to try to hasten the passage of kidney stones.
2018|Anthropology|Tomas Persson, Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc, and Elainie Madsen for collecting evidence, in a zoo, that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often, and about as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees.
2018|Biology|Paul Becher and colleagues for demonstrating that wine experts can reliably identify, by smell, the presence of a fly in their glass of wine.
2018|Chemistry|Paula Romão and colleagues for measuring the degree to which human saliva is a good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces.
2018|Medical Education|Akira Horiuchi for the medical report "Colonoscopy in the Sitting Position: Lessons Learned from Self-Colonoscopy."
2018|Literature|Thea Blackler and colleagues for documenting that most people who use complicated products do not read the instruction manual.
2018|Nutrition|James Cole for calculating that the caloric intake from a human-cannibalism diet is significantly lower than the caloric intake from most other traditional meat-based diets.
2018|Peace|Francisco Alonso and colleagues for measuring the frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an automobile.
2018|Reproductive Medicine|John Barry, Bruce Blank, and Michel Boileau for using postage stamps to test whether the male sexual organ is functioning properly — the test being to put postage stamps on the organ before going to sleep, and to inspect them in the morning.
2018|Economics|Lindie Hanyu Liang and colleagues for investigating whether it is effective for employees to use voodoo dolls to retaliate against abusive bosses.
2019|Medicine|Silvano Gallus for collecting evidence that pizza might protect against illness and death, if the pizza is made and eaten in Italy.
2019|Medical Education|Karen Pryor and Theresa McKeon for using a simple animal-training technique — clicker training — to train surgeons to perform orthopedic surgery.
2019|Biology|Ling-Jun Kong and colleagues for discovering that dead magnetized cockroaches behave differently than living magnetized cockroaches.
2019|Anatomy|Roger Mieusset and Bourras Bengoudifa for measuring scrotal temperature asymmetry in naked and clothed postmen in France.
2019|Chemistry|Shigeru Watanabe and colleagues for estimating the total saliva volume produced per day by a typical five-year-old child.
2019|Engineering|Iman Farahbakhsh for inventing a diaper-changing machine for use on human infants.
2019|Economics|Habip Gedik, Timothy A. Voss, and Andreas Voss for testing which country's paper money is best at transmitting dangerous bacteria.
2019|Peace|Ghada A. bin Saif and colleagues for trying to measure the pleasurability of scratching an itch.
2019|Psychology|Fritz Strack for discovering that holding a pen in one's mouth makes one smile, which makes one feel happy — and for discovering that this effect is not robust.
2019|Physics|Patricia Yang, Alexander Lee, and colleagues for studying how, and why, wombats make cube-shaped poo.
2020|Acoustics|Stephan Reber and colleagues for inducing a female Chinese alligator to bellow in an airtight chamber filled with helium-enriched air.
2020|Economics|Christopher Watkins and colleagues for trying to quantify the relationship between different countries' national income inequality and the average amount of mouth-to-mouth kissing.
2020|Entomology|Richard Vetter for collecting evidence that many entomologists (scientists who study insects) are afraid of spiders.
2020|Management|Five professional hitmen in Guangxi, China, who managed a contract for a hit job by repeatedly subcontracting the work to cheaper and cheaper hitmen, none of whom ever carried out the murder.
2020|Materials Science|Metin Eren and colleagues for showing that knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work well.
2020|Medicine|Nienke Vulink, Damiaan Denys, and Arnoud van Loon for diagnosing a long-unrecognized medical condition: Misophonia, the distress at hearing other people make chewing sounds.
2020|Medical Education|Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi, Alexandr Lukashenko, Donald Trump, and others 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.
2020|Peace|The governments of India and Pakistan for having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other's doorbells in the middle of the night, repeatedly, over many years.
2020|Physics|Ivan Maksymov and Andrey Pototsky for determining, experimentally, what happens to the shape of a living earthworm when one vibrates the earthworm at high frequency.
2020|Psychology|Miranda Giacomin and Nicholas Rule for devising a method to identify narcissists by examining their eyebrows.
2021|Biology|Susanne Schötz, Robert Eklund, and Joost van de Weijer for analyzing variations in purring, chirping, chattering, trilling, tweedling, murmuring, meowing, moaning, squeaking, hissing, yowling, howling, growling, and other modes of cat-human communication.
2021|Ecology|Leila Satari and colleagues for using genetic analysis to identify the different species of bacteria that reside in discarded chewing gum stuck on streets in various countries.
2021|Chemistry|Jörg Wicker and colleagues for chemically analyzing the air inside movie theaters to test whether the odors produced by an audience reliably indicate the levels of violence, sex, antisocial behavior, drug use, and bad language in the movie being watched.
2021|Economics|Pavlo Blavatskyy for discovering that the obesity of a country's politicians may be a good indicator of that country's level of corruption.
2021|Medicine|Olcay Cem Bulut and colleagues for demonstrating that sexual orgasms can be as effective as decongestant medicine in treating nasal congestion.
2021|Peace|Ethan Beseris, Steven Naleway, and David Carrier for testing the hypothesis that humans evolved beards to protect themselves from punches to the face.
2021|Physics|Alessandro Corbetta and colleagues for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not constantly collide with other pedestrians.
2021|Kinetics|Hisashi Murakami and colleagues for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do sometimes collide with other pedestrians.
2021|Entomology|John Mulrennan Jr. and colleagues for their research study "A New Method of Cockroach Control on Submarines."
2021|Transportation|Robin Radcliffe and colleagues for determining by experiment whether it is safer to transport an airborne rhinoceros upside down.
2022|Applied Cardiology|Eliska Prochazkova and colleagues for seeking and finding evidence that when new romantic partners meet for the first time, they can unconsciously synchronize their heart rates and heartbeats.
2022|Literature|Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica, and Edward Gibson for analyzing what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand.
2022|Biology|Solimary García-Hernández and Glauco Machado for studying whether and how constipation affects the mating prospects of scorpions.
2022|Medicine|Marcin Jasiński and colleagues for showing that when patients undergo some forms of toxic chemotherapy, they suffer fewer side effects when ice cream is used as a substitute for ice chips.
2022|Engineering|Gen Matsuzaki and colleagues for trying to discover the most efficient way for people to use their fingers when turning a knob.
2022|Art History|Peter de Smet and Nicholas Hellmuth for their study "A Multidisciplinary Approach to Ritual Enema Scenes on Ancient Maya Pottery."
2022|Physics|Frank Fish and colleagues for trying to understand how ducklings manage to swim in formation.
2022|Peace|Junhui Wu and colleagues for developing an algorithm to help gossipers decide when to tell the truth and when to lie.
2022|Economics|Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda for explaining, mathematically, why success most often goes not to the most talented people, but instead to the luckiest.
2022|Safety Engineering|Magnus Gens for developing a moose crash-test dummy.
2023|Chemistry and Geology|Jan Zalasiewicz for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.
2023|Literature|Chris Moulin and colleagues for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.
2023|Nutrition|Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.
2023|Medicine|Christine Pham and colleagues for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils.
2023|Mechanical Engineering|Te Faye Yap and colleagues for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.
2023|Public Health|Seung-min Park for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies to analyze the substances that emerge from a person.
2023|Physics|Bieito Fernández Castro and colleagues for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.
2023|Education|Katy Tam and colleagues for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.
2023|Communication|María José Torres-Prioris and colleagues for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backwards.
2023|Psychology|Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.
2024|Anatomy|Marjolaine Willems and colleagues for studying whether the hair on the heads of most people in the northern hemisphere swirls in the clockwise direction, and whether most people in the southern hemisphere have hair that swirls the other way.
2024|Biology|Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen for their discovery that, when you place a suction cup against a cow's side, the cow produces more milk — and that if you then explode a paper bag next to the cat standing on the cow's back, even more milk is produced.
2024|Botany|Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plants.
2024|Chemistry|Tess Heeremans and colleagues for using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.
2024|Demography|Saul Justin Newman for detective work to discover that many of the people famous for having the longest lives are actually not that old.
2024|Medicine|Lieven A. Schenk, Tahmine Fadai, and Christian Büchel for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side-effects.
2024|Peace|B. F. Skinner for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles, to guide the missiles to their targets.
2024|Physics|James C. Liao for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.
2024|Physiology|Ryo Okabe and colleagues for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus.
2024|Probability|František Bartoš and colleagues for showing, both in theory and by 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it is slightly more likely to land on the same face as it started.
2025|Aviation|Francisco Sánchez and colleagues for studying whether ingesting alcohol can impair bats' ability to fly and echolocate.
2025|Biology|Tomoki Kojima and colleagues for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid being bitten by flies.
2025|Chemistry|Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich, and Frank Greenway for experiments to test whether eating Teflon is a good way to increase food variety in one's diet.
2025|Engineering Design|Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal for analyzing, from an engineering design perspective, how foul-smelling shoes cause harm.
2025|Literature|William B. Bean for persistently recording and analyzing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails every day for 35 years.
2025|Nutrition|Daniele Dendi and colleagues for studying the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain insects based on the insects' levels of toxic contamination.
2025|Peace|Fritz Renner and colleagues for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person's ability to speak a foreign language.
2025|Pediatrics|Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp for studying what a nursing baby experiences when the baby's mother eats garlic.
2025|Physics|Giacomo Bartolucci and colleagues for discoveries about the physics of pasta sauce, especially the phase transition between a lumpy sauce and a smooth sauce.
2025|Psychology|Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles Gignac for investigating what happens when you tell narcissists — or anyone else — their IQ score.