Hot off the press, get it while it lasts — the 2007 Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded:
- MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects.” You can see one of the authors do his Sword SwallowingPHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled – and the allied topic of draping.
- BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night. No link to her classic lecture “A Bed Ecosystem,” but you can look it up in the lecture abstracts of the 1st Benelux Congress of Zoology, Leuven, November 4-5, 1994, p. 36. However, if you value a good nights sleep as I do, I recommend against actually reading her work.
- CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring — from cow dung. I just wonder why they thought to look for vanillin there in the first place. Toscanini’s Ice Cream, the finest ice cream shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a new ice cream flavor in honor of Mayu Yamamoto, and introduced it at the Ig Nobel ceremony. The flavor is called “Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist.”
- LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Noria Sebastian-Gallos, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards. No word if this effect has been replicated in mice, which make a better analog for humans.
- LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word “the” — and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order. Hey, Microsoft can’t properly order numbers, so we have no hope of handling “The” properly. A maybe, An probably, but not The.
- PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon — the so-called “gay bomb” — that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other. I’m outraged they didn’t include a citation for the fact that this groundbreaking work also examined the desirability of a chemical weapon that created “severe and lasting halitosis” – or that it dates back to at least 1994.
- NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup. If you’re interesting in losing weight, try his book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. Professor Wansink is also a Stanford grad.
- ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
- AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters. So next time you take your hamster on a long flight, don’t forget the Viagra.
While there is a certain silliness to the these, there is more than a little importance. As the award states, the Ig Nobel is for achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think.
