FEEDBACK鈥橲 favourite prizes, the Ig Nobels, were handed out last week at Harvard University in a ceremony produced by the Annals of Improbable Research that featured a mini-opera, Inertia makes the world go round.
We can鈥檛 help feeling a little proud that we spotted a couple of the prize-winning achievements ourselves. One was for the peace prize, which went to the inventor of cellphone ring tones that teenagers can hear but their teachers can鈥檛 (2 September). The other was for the literature prize, which went to Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University for his learned tome 鈥淐onsequences of erudite vernacular utilised irrespective of necessity鈥�, the title of which is an example of what it is about (20 May).
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In addition, The Last Word, our friendly rival on the opposite page, years ago pondered the question of why dry spaghetti breaks into more than two pieces which then fly into the most inconvenient places possible (25 April 1998 and 12 December 1998). Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Universit茅 Pierre et Marie Curie have now answered this question to earn the Ig Nobel physics prize.
There are some things we are proud we have not done, one of which is exploring the new approach to stopping hiccups which scooped the medicine prize. Memory tells of folk cures that involved surprising or distracting the sufferer, and applying the prize-winning technique would certainly do that. It is memorably summarised by the identical titles of two separate papers, 鈥淭ermination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage,鈥� which earned Ig Nobel prizes for Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine and Majed Odeh of Bnai Zion Medical Center in Haifa, Israel.
鈥淭he pet-food section of Craig Lindsay鈥檚 supermarket contained a box of 50 pigs鈥� ears. It was labelled 鈥�100 per cent natural ingredients鈥�, leaving Lindsay unsurprised鈥�
Nor had we contemplated the surprisingly finicky dietary tastes of Scarabaeus cristatus, the study of which garnered the nutrition prize for Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Authority. Not just any old dung will do for this dung beetle. It definitely prefers the more fluid dung of horses to the drier dung from camels or sheep, and will settle for dog or fox dung only if no passing herbivores have been kind enough to leave its dinner.
Mosquitoes are also fussy in their tastes, but their penchant is for human foot odour, entomologist Bart Knols of the Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands has learned. Hot on the trail of an odoriferous way to divert the mosquitoes, Knols found that for them the scent of Limburger cheese is enticingly like that of human feet, a discovery that earned him the Ig Nobel in biology. Alas for mosquito researchers, residents of malarial climes and the makers of Limburger cheese, in the real world the cheese was less enticing than sweaty feet after all.
If you don鈥檛 want to dig into dung or smelly feet, you could always listen to fingernails screeching on a blackboard, which has led to the acoustics prize for Randolph Blake, now at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, and former colleagues Lynn Halpern and James Hillenbrand. Curious why that sound makes us shiver, Blake tested volunteers and found that, for example, the scraping of metal on metal was not nearly as annoying. At first he suspected it was the high frequencies in the screech that caused discomfort, but experiments showed it was really frequencies in the middle of the hearing range. The psychological basis of the reaction remains a mystery, but Blake says chimpanzee warning cries 鈥渁re remarkably similar to fingernails on a blackboard鈥�. So perhaps we shiver because it sounds like an ancestral warning that a sabre-toothed tiger is on the prowl.
Banging your head against the wall might make a more pleasant sound if it didn鈥檛 hurt so much. But that doesn鈥檛 bother pileated woodpeckers 鈥� they can head bang up to 12,000 times a day without getting a headache. Explaining how this is possible earned the ornithology prize for the late Philip May of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Ivan Schwab of the University of California, Davis. May discovered that the bird had a thick skull made of spongy bone which held the contents tightly in place, just as styrofoam blocks keep objects from bouncing around inside boxes. 鈥淚t鈥檚 the bouncing that causes damage,鈥� Schwab explains. He believes woodpeckers evolved small brains to make them more resistant to impact, although we wonder if birds of little brain were merely the ones most likely to become head-bangers in the first place.
Finally, the mathematics prize went to Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation for their solution to the problem of how many photos you must take of a group to be sure you get one where nobody blinks. The bigger the crowd, they found, the less likely it gets, becoming virtually impossible for a crowd of 50 鈥� and, as Murphy鈥檚 law predicts, telling people not to blink makes them blink more.