IgNobel Prizes 2012

This week, you get a break from what some of my readers call “nosebleed science” because it is that time of the year for the kind of achievements, including those in science that “first makes you laugh then makes you think”: the IgNobel Prizes. It is on its 22nd year and the awards night was held last Sept. 20, produced by the science humor magazine “Annals of Improbable Research” (AIR), and co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students, and the Harvard Computer Society.

We start off with the most important of all — our health. If you have a tummy problem that will require a colonoscopy, you would release some air of relief when you learn that the IgNobel for Medicine went to work that would hopefully be considered by your doctors. Let us just say that apparently, when you undergo colonoscopy, there is some risk that you (yes, you the patient) could explode (you read right, “explode”). In 2007, a work entitled “Colonic Gas Explosion During Therapeutic Colonoscopy with Electrocautery,” by Spiros D. Ladas, George Karamanolis, Emmanuel Ben-Soussan, was published in the World Journal of Gastroenterology. In it, the scientists published technical “tips” on how to avoid this conceivably life-threatening situation. But I think if you do explode and survive it, I think it is also equally conceivable that you would need some therapy to arm you with the magnanimity to face the endless stories about it.

The IgNobel for Anatomy went to work that really focused on a body part — the rear ends of chimpanzees. The scientists, Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny who take the credit for this kind of focus, have observed and documented that indeed, it is not just the chimp’s face that can launch a thousand ships for chimpanzees, it is also their butts. Apparently, chimps can identify other chimps by seeing even just photos of chimp butts. Their work is documented in “Faces and Behinds: Chimpanzee Sex Perception” in Advanced Science Letters.

Hair was the subject of the IgNobel for Physics and Chemistry. The Physics Prize went to styled hair — ponytail — while the Chemistry prize went to uncovering the mystery of green hair in some residents of a town in Sweden. The Physics prize went to Joseph Keller, Raymond Goldstein, Patrick Warren, and Robin Ball for “calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.” Their work was entitled “The Shape of a Ponytail and the Statistical Physics of Hair Fiber Bundles” in the Physical Review Letters, vol. 198, no. 7, 2012. I don’t know how much excitement propelled this research but their story should have been included in the book I came across recently entitled “Boredom, a Lively History” which makes for a case that we are wired to be bored so we can do things that won’t allow us stay bored.  

The Chemistry Prize went to an environmental engineer named Johan Pettersson “for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people’s hair turned green.” The culprit was the copper that peeled from the pipes when hot water stayed there overnight. Science has always known that copper is almost always responsible for dying hair green. And I mean serious green like in those of doll trolls famous in the 90s.

And are you clumsy? I am quite clumsy. When I was a kid, my mother’s voice would be heard echoing across the house “why do you spill everything?” I can now have a scientific answer for her courtesy of the IgNobel awardees for Fluid Dynamics, physicists Rouslan Krechetnikov and Hans Mayer who chose to study the details of coffee swinging and bobbing, “to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.” The details, if you want to annoy your friends (and maybe your mother) who walk with you after buying coffee from a coffee shop, are found in Physical Review E, vol. 85, 2012 and it is entitled, what else, “Walking With Coffee: Why Does It Spill?”

The Ignobel for Acoustics went to Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada for devising the SpeechJammer that could silence blabbers. I wrote about this in a column last March entitled “How to Stop a Talking Head.” This should have gotten the IgNobel for Peace since aside from giving us silence, it does it without causing physical harm; although I can’t be sure of the effect on the blabber’s ego.  

And you think that death is really the last thing living things do? Apparently, scientists wanted to show us that if doctors are not careful with their measurements of brain activity, the dead may seem to indicate that they are still living.  Well, at least for dead salmon. I read the research with bated breath because I was so sure it had some sort of punch line at the end. Their volunteer subject (well, we had to be sure it was not coerced to participate in the research) was one “mature Atlantic salmon” which in the paper was described as “not alive” at the time its brain was scanned for activity. As if scanning the brain of a dead salmon were not puzzling enough, as a method, the scientists showed pictures of human beings to the salmon (who was still dead). They “required” the salmon to “determine the emotion of the human in the photo.” Even if I give it to the scientists that they were entertaining a healthy dose of scepticism as to the capacity for feedback of a “dead salmon,” I am still wondering as to why they used photos of emoting humans (and not of salmon or maybe a bear) to show to the dead salmon. The IgNobel awardees for Neuroscience were Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford.

And of course, we have the IgNobel for Peace. This year, it went to a Russian company called The SKN Company for converting old Russian ammunition into nano-diamonds. According to their own definition, a nano-diamond “is a synthetic powder material produced by blowing up high explosives in special conditions.” But ladies, these cannot be your best friends as they are sized so small (largest is 200 nanometers which is about 100th the size of the diameter of the human hair). It may be too cumbersome to always carry a microscope when you show off your nano-diamond ring.  

The remaining Ignobel is for Literature and it was given to the US Government Accountability Office for “issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.” I think this is definitive proof of the potency of one report to be the Genghis Khan to so many other reports. The report is entitled “Actions Needed to Evaluate the Impact of Efforts to Estimate Costs of Reports and Studies,” GAO-12-480R, May 10, 2012. I am envious as am sure we have similar prolific reports in many of our government offices.

So there, laugh and then think. Then you can laugh again. It is known to happen.

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