2010 Ig Nobel prizes: the winners
FEEDBACK’S favourite prizes, the Ig Nobels, were handed out last week in a at Harvard University. They salute achievements that “make you laugh, then make you think”.
One of these winners seems destined for Ig Nobel immortality: the epic report “Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time”, in PLoS ONE (vol 4, p e7595). Complete with X-rated video, it was extensively covered by the media, 51¶ŻÂţ included.
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Peeping at the private activities of short-nosed fruit bats earned Min Tan and seven colleagues of the Guangdong Entomological Institute in Guangzhou, China, the Ig Nobel biology prize. It also resulted in controversy, when a male university researcher in Ireland was charged with sexual harassment after showing the report to a female colleague.
THE Ig Nobel public health prize was awarded to Manuel Barbeito, Charles Matthews and Larry Taylor for recognising a new laboratory peril in 1967, when they were working in Fort Detrick, Maryland, at the US army’s industrial health and safety office. The army’s biowarfare lab was next door, so the potential escape of pathogens was a source of concern. 51¶ŻÂţs had to wear face masks in the lab, but these didn’t fit well over beards. One day, Barbeito recalls, “A scientist who had never given us any problems grew a beard when he was working in the containment lab. I said he shouldn’t have a beard because it would get contaminated. He asked where the data was to prove it was a hazard.”
Barbeito couldn’t find any relevant research, so he and three other volunteers grew beards for 73 days, then sprayed them with solutions of harmless bacteria, which they then tried to wash out. They found that some bacteria remained. Then they put a fake beard on a mannequin, sprayed it with pathogenic bacteria and put chickens and guinea pigs nearby. Some of them got sick. The bearded scientist said, “OK, you win,” and shaved. Barbeito’s results appeared in Applied Microbiology (vol 15, p 899).
A SIMILARLY empirical test validated a winter safety tip. The municipality of Dunedin, New Zealand, advises people using icy footpaths in the hilly town to wear socks over their shoes to avoid slipping. Unable to locate any research supporting the idea, Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago bought a batch of socks and offered pairs to people walking along the footpaths one freezing day. The researcher found that people wearing socks over their shoes felt that they had better traction.
However, many thought wearing socks over their shoes looked odd and declined to continue the practice for the rest of their walk, “including one young man who promptly fell on leaving the assessment area”, the researchers wrote in the New Zealand Medical Journal (vol 122, p 31). Their demonstration of the benefit of friction earned them the Ig Nobel physics prize.
IDENTIFYING what ails whales can be difficult. Collecting samples “from large, migratory, water-bound mammals has obvious logistical, welfare and cost implications”, as pointed out in Animal Conservation (vol 13, p 217) by Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London and Diane Gendron of the National Polytechnic Institute in La Paz, Mexico.
Instead of trying to catch whales, they buzzed the surfacing creatures with a 3-kilogram model helicopter equipped with Petri dishes or sterilised plastic sheets to collect “exhaled breath condensate”. That’s the cetacean equivalent of snot, which whales eject from their blowholes. Successfully collecting samples from 22 whales earned them the engineering prize.
CONGRATULATIONS are due to Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University in Japan, who this year scooped his second Ig Nobel. In 2008 he shared the cognitive science prize for showing that slime moulds can find the fastest path through a maze to get to food. This year his group earned the prize for transportation planning by showing that slime mould “forms networks with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost to those of real-world infrastructure networks – in this case, the Tokyo rail system” (Science, vol 327, p 439).
PEOPLE who hurt themselves often swear. Wondering if this does any good, Richard Stephens, John Atkins and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, asked volunteers to immerse a hand in icy water and either swear or say neutral words. Saying something we would rather not print here “increased pain tolerance, increased heart rate and decreased perceived pain compared with not swearing”, the team reported in Neuroreport (vol 20, p 1056), earning them the Ig Nobel peace prize.
FINALLY, a special guest at the Harvard ceremony was Elena Bodnar of the Trauma Risk Management Research Institute in Chicago, who won the 2009 Ig Nobel public health prize for inventing a bra that can double as two protective face masks in an emergency. For your chance to win one of these life-saving items of lingerie, visit our competition page at www.bit.ly/bracomp and give us your best idea for multifunctional clothing.
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