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With all of the attention and excitement that the
Nobel Prize announcements this week have attracted, a smaller
celebration of science honored some intriguing and fairly humorous work.
Recognizing work that may never win recognition from the Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences, the Ig Nobel Prizes demonstrate the lighter side of
science and academia.
Presented at Harvard University on Sept. 29 and organized by the science
satire journal Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobels honor work
in the sciences, medicine, literature, peace and public safety. While
you might think deeply when examining the work of this week's Nobel
laureates, these awards will give you some equally deep thoughts as well
as a good laugh.
Here's a recap of this year's winners:
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Biology Prize: Back in 1985, Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz discovered
that males of an Australian beetle species were very attracted to a
certain line of beer bottles. The males mistook the bottles for female
beetles because of their color and attempted to mate with the bottles.
Chemistry Prize: While fire alarms typically rely on a really loud sound
and flashing strobes, a team of Japanese scientists came up with an
alarm that uses wasabi vapors. The group identified a high enough
airborne concentration of the Japanese horseradish that can awaken
sleeping individuals, designed an alarm around it, and filed a patent
back in 2009.
Literature Prize: Ever wondered how you can channel your procrastination
successfully? So did John Perry, a philosophy professor at Stanford
University, whose Theory of Structured Procrastination encourages people
to do something important as a means of not doing something even more
important.
Mathematics Prize: A number of individuals, including Pat Robertson and
Harold Camping, share this year's prize, which recognized the importance
of taking care when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.
Cumulatively the awardees have predicted the world would end in 1954,
1982, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1999 and 2011. How many times have you lived
through the apocalypse?
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Medicine Prize: Ever wonder how your thinking changes when your bladder
is really, really full? A team of researchers from Europe, the U.S., and
Australia tested people's ability to make decisions while they had a
strong urge to locate a rest room. Among differences found in their
decision making processes, participants who had to urinate really badly
were more likely to put off receiving a reward than those whose bladders
were content.
Peace Prize: If you thought getting your car towed was bad enough if you
parked illegally, check out an alternative mode of enforcement by
Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania. In a video posted on
Youtube, Zuokas uses an armored tank to run over a luxury car illegally
parked on one of Vilnius's streets.
Physics Prize: Discus throwers and hammer throwers both spin around in
their events, yet only discus throwers get dizzy. Researchers from
France and The Netherlands found that this is due to a visual impairment
that occurs when discus throwers spin around, causing them to lose their
bearings that prevent them from becoming dizzy.
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Physiology Prize: Are yawns really contagious? Not in Red-Footed
Tortoises according to a group of researchers from the UK and Austria.
By testing these tortoises for signs of contagious yawning through
several mechanisms, they concluded that a contagious yawn involves
complex social processes rather than being the result of some simple
action pattern.
Psychology Prize: Why do we sigh? Karl Halvor Teigen addressed that
question in a study he published back in 2008. He found that the act of
sighing is an unintentional expression of "an activity, plan or desire
that has to be discarded, creating a pause before it can be replaced by
a novel initiative."
Public Safety Prize: While the odds of any of us driving a convertible
with a visor repeatedly flapping down in front of our eyes is quite low,
John Senders of the University of Toronto demonstrated how a visual
obstruction repeated blocking his vision alters his ability to drive
safely on I-495 outside of Boston.
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