2010 Ig Nobel prizes: the winners
FEEDBACK鈥橲 favourite prizes, the Ig Nobels, were handed out last week in a at Harvard University. They salute achievements that 鈥渕ake you laugh, then make you think鈥�.
One of these winners seems destined for Ig Nobel immortality: the epic report 鈥淔ellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time鈥�, in PLoS ONE (vol 4, p e7595). Complete with X-rated video, it was extensively covered by the media, New 杏吧原创 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鈥檚 industrial health and safety office. The army鈥檚 biowarfare lab was next door, so the potential escape of pathogens was a source of concern. 杏吧原创s had to wear face masks in the lab, but these didn鈥檛 fit well over beards. One day, Barbeito recalls, 鈥淎 scientist who had never given us any problems grew a beard when he was working in the containment lab. I said he shouldn鈥檛 have a beard because it would get contaminated. He asked where the data was to prove it was a hazard.鈥�
Barbeito couldn鈥檛 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, 鈥淥K, you win,鈥� and shaved. Barbeito鈥檚 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, 鈥渋ncluding one young man who promptly fell on leaving the assessment area鈥�, 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 鈥渇rom large, migratory, water-bound mammals has obvious logistical, welfare and cost implications鈥�, 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 鈥渆xhaled breath condensate鈥�. That鈥檚 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 鈥渇orms networks with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost to those of real-world infrastructure networks 鈥� in this case, the Tokyo rail system鈥� (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 鈥渋ncreased pain tolerance, increased heart rate and decreased perceived pain compared with not swearing鈥�, 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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