Eleanor Maguire wasn't too thrilled when she was first offered an Ig Nobel Prize. The neuroscientist at University College London was being honoured for her study showing that London taxi drivers have larger hippocampi in their brains than do people in other professions1. But she worried that accepting the prize would be a disaster for her career. So, she quietly turned it down. Three years later, the prize's founder, Marc Abrahams, contacted Maguire again with the same offer. This time, she knew more about the satirical award that bills itself as honouring achievements that 'make people laugh, then think'. She decided to accept. On the way to the ceremony, her taxi driver was so delighted to learn about his enlarged hippocampus that he refused to accept a fee from her. Maguire credits the prize with bringing more attention to her work. 'It was useful for my career because people wanted to talk about it,' she says, adding that 'it was on the front pages of newspapers when it came...
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