Catch tonight’s Ig Nobel awards online

The Nobel Prizes are just around the corner (and someone's even running a futures market where you can predict the winners). That means it's time for a different set of annual awards: the Ig Nobels, handed out by the Annals of Improbable Research. The goal of the awards is to honor scientific endeavors that "first make people laugh and then make them think."

In the past, research of that sort has included exploding colons in the operating room, fellatio among fruit bats, the theory of structured procrastination, and a gay bomb. But, as all good awards do, the Ig Nobels get handed out in a lavish and excessive ceremony. In this case, the ceremony features keynote lectures (like Doug Zongker's "Chicken chicken chicken: chicken chicken"), a short opera, and a child who gets people off stage by repeating "I'm bored, please stop" until they depart.

The ceremony takes place tonight at 6pm US Eastern time, and it will be live streamed. If this is your cup of tea, we've embedded the livestream below.