To ‘the’ or not to ‘the’

I am not so sure though how the Dutch who are known to harbor high pride in their dairy would feel about the research that made vanilla ice cream from cow poo. This work by Mayu Yamamoto tastefully won this year’s IgNobel for Chemistry “for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring — from cow dung.” I do not know if we have run out of ways to produce the venerable vanilla the way nature does it without having to “recycle” cow poo. I really hope not because I think ice cream made from cow excrement, while seeming to be chemically safe, should be reserved as punishment dessert for convicted sex offenders. But still, in the interest of science, if you are at all interested to duplicate his methods, you can find it in his study entitled “Novel Production Method for Plant Polyphenol from Livestock Excrement Using Subcritical Water Reaction” in the International Medical Center of Japan. It was also reported all over that an ice cream flavor inspired by this IgNobel winner (not the one out of this experiment) was introduced at the IgNobel by an ice cream shop in Cambridge. The flavor is called “Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist.” It was not mentioned if anyone really tried to taste it.

But if you have to fly halfway around the globe to Cambridge, Mass. from here to taste the rather unique ice cream, you may want an interesting new finding about a remedy for jetlag. It was tried on hamsters in the hope that it should not only be good for jetsetting rodents but for humans as well. And what makes it even more interesting is that they found this out while actually giving the rats drugs which could aid in male potency. This IgNobel for Aviation went to 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” found in their published work, “Sildenafil Accelerates Reentrainment of Circadian Rhythms After Advancing Light Schedules,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 23, June 5, 2007. Judging only from the hundreds of junk mail I get every week selling me Viagra or its chemical cousins, I am inclined to think that the supporters and promoters of male hydraulic power will not stop until the National Geographic Channel includes the human male organ in the list of structures in its show called Megastructures. OK fellas, just for perspective — the tallest erected structure now is a transmission antenna in North Dakota at 2,063 feet and the world’s tallest building yet to be finished will rise 2625 feet in Dubai. Go get a calculator.

On a topic related to maleness — wars — the IgNobel awarded its prize for Peace for the transformative concept paper by the Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for “instigating research and development on a chemical weapon — the so-called ‘gay bomb’ — that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.” Entitled “Harassing, Annoying, and ‘Bad Guy’ Identifying Chemicals,” the secretive-looking document was dated June 1, 1994. This is a strategic cousin of Lysistrata, an anti-war ploy concocted by women in a story written by Aristophanes in 411 BC. In the story, Greek women led by a woman named Lysistrata refused to have sex with their husbands to end the Peloponnesian War. This IgNobel-winning “gay bomb” is certainly a solution for peace in situ, and perhaps, less painful for the men than Lysistrata.

I really read the said document and it even included chemicals that could “attract annoying animals to enemy positions.” While I really admire this “peace-intending” document for many reasons, I will not stop until I have proven my suspicion that either Woody Allen or Mel Brooks planted this document in the said Air Force lab. I also personally think that Woody Allen inspired this next IgNobel-earning work — “net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately” — that won for Economics considering many of the hilarious comical bank robbery film plots by Woody Allen. Mr. Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, is the recipient of this IgNobel honor and he even patented this device in 2001. I personally have never heard of bank robbers caught this way, except in the old Batman TV episodes that showed call-outs that said “Kapow!” and “Wack!”

The IgNobel for Nutrition would have mothers and owners of eat-all-you-can restaurants give high-fives to each other for confirming what they probably have known along — that if your bowl is “bottomless,” human appetite seems boundless! This award was given to Brian Wansink of Cornell University. In his experiment entitled “Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake,” with his co-authors James E. Painter and Jill North, that was published in Obesity Research, vol. 13, no. 1, January 2005, pp. 93-100, they concluded that if the bowl is self-refilling, people think they eat less, regardless of the actual amount of food they have had. This research is further cooked in Wansink’s book entitled “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think,” Brian Wansink, Bantom Books, 2006.

The last IgNobel this year went to Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee for Medicine, for their study entitled “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects,” that appeared in the British Medical Journal, December 23, 2006, vol. 333, pp. 1285-7. I read their paper and they had 110 sword swallowers from 16 countries responding to their survey. The major conclusions from their study warn that when swallowing a sword, you should not be distracted by another task and that swallowing more than one sword or unusually shaped blades pose serious complications. At this point, most readers, especially mothers, are probably surprised as to why these conclusions about the dangers of sword-swallowing even needed medical peer-review. The researchers also found out that perforations in the esophagus do occur but these are treatable. They even mentioned that sore throats could be caused by swallowing swords. As to why you would agree to swallow swords and still worry about the less dangerous sore throat side effect is a reversal in thinking that I think could earn the sword swallower another distinction — the Darwin Award given to those “who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.”

IgNobel successfully and more importantly, joyfully, reminds us that science is a human endeavor that could be infected with a sense of humor as much as it is armed with logic and mathematical rigor. To be curious is to pursue as well as to laugh at ourselves and what we stumble upon along the way. It is not only for Einstein and his peers. It is here. It is ours.

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