Misophonia and other thought-provoking research win parody Nobels

The 30th annual Ig Nobel Prizes — a parody of the infamous Swedish awards — were announced as part of a virtual ceremony last night, and this year's winners revealed that there is no shortage of offbeat research. One team was recognized for devising a method to identify narcissists from examining their eyebrows — their research (published in a peer-reviewed journal) found that narcissists tended to have thicker or denser eyebrows. Another team won for coming up with diagnostic criteria for misophonia, the distress of hearing certain sounds like other people's chewing. On a more thought-provoking note, the leaders of Brazil, India, the U.S., the U.K., and five other countries were also deemed laureates — "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."