FEEDBACK’S favourite prizes – the Ig Nobels – were handed out last week at Harvard University. Sponsored by the humourous magazine the Annals of Improbable Research, the prizes honour achievements that “cannot or should not be reproduced”. This year’s crop was a rich one.
A little device that can enhance interspecies understanding – at least between dogs and humans – earned Matsumi Suzuki of the Japan Acoustic Lab the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. Bowlingual translates a dog’s barks into Japanese. The devices were a big hit when they went on sale last month for 14,800 yen (about £77) in Japan, and some retailers sold out. We’re looking forward to an English-to-dog version so we can tell our next-door neighbour’s terrier to “put a sock in it”.
Research on a rather different type of interspecies behaviour earned Norma Bubier, Charles Paxton, Phil Bowers, and Charles Deeming the Ig Nobel in Biology. Four years ago they published a seminal paper in British Poultry Science: “Courtship behaviour of ostriches toward humans under farming conditions in Britain” (vol 39, p 477). They discovered that ostriches hand-reared by farm workers tended to identify with humans rather than with other birds. This had consequences during the mating season that didn’t help produce more ostriches.
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Staying with animals, the Ig Nobel Prize for Mathematics went to K. P. Sreekumar of Kerala Agricultural University in India for a paper titled “Estimation of the total surface area in Indian elephants”. Knowing an animal’s surface area is important because it affects their metabolism, but measuring it in the case of an elephant poses obvious problems. Sreekumar and his late colleague G. Nirmalan analysed elephantine body geometry and measured body parts to calculate total surface area. They then derived equations that enabled them to estimate any elephant’s area from just a couple of simple measurements, without all the fuss and bother.
Chris McManus of University College London relied on smaller-scale measurements to earn the Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine for his careful comparison of “Scrotal asymmetry in man and in ancient sculpture” (Nature, vol 259, p 426).
Meanwhile the Ig Nobel in Chemistry went to Theodore Gray for building a periodic table of the elements out of wood, complete with places to store samples of all the ones that aren’t too radioactive. So far he’s stashed samples of 81 elements in the table, as you can see for yourself at . He’s still looking for vanadium and depleted uranium, in case you happen to have any surplus chunks lying around.
And if you happen to have any surplus chunks of money lying around, it’s no thanks to the long list of corporate executives, directors, and auditors – such as those connected with Enron – who shared the Ig Nobel Prize for Economics. They win the award for “adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world”.
Which leaves us in the proper mood to retire to the pub and repeat the experiment that earned Arnd Leike of the University of Munich the Ig Nobel for Physics. He carefully poured three kinds of beer into uniform mugs, and demonstrated that the foamy heads decayed following an exponential law (European Journal of Physics, vol 23, p 21).
A FAILED British punk rock singer is not the first person you’d expect to further the public understanding of science, but then John Otway (whose last and only hit record was in 1978) is no ordinary failed punk rock singer. For a start, he has kept a loyal group of fans during all his years in the wilderness, and it was his fans who selected Bunsen burner as his new single after he sent 2000 of them a CD of 11 new compositions to choose from.
Bunsen burner was inspired by Otway’s daughter’s science homework. As well as the theme in the title, the lyrics touch on several laboratory procedures and include felicitous lines such as “You’re the kind of carbon I can date”.
According to a recent article in The Independent, Otway’s fans are determined to make the single his second hit, as a present to him for his 50th birthday. They have been promoting it so vigorously that 20,000 advance copies have been ordered and success seems assured. So it won’t be long before the whole of Britain will be humming along to the song’s rousing chorus line: “Let me be your Bunsen burner, baby, let me be your naked flame.”
FINALLY, and continuing in the music industry, we have confirmation that Elvis lives.
Go to and click on “Album charts”. The number one album shown at the time of writing is, of course, Elvls – 30 Number 1 Hits. Below is a link: “Search for tour dates”.
Has someone blown the whistle on naughty Google? Until last week, if you typed in the words “go to hell” and then clicked on “Google search”, the first suggested site that came up was that of the Microsoft corporation