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A UK/US team that came up with an equation to predict
the shape of a ponytail has earned itself an Ig Nobel.
Patrick Warren, Raymond Goldstein, Robin Ball and Joe Keller picked up
their prestigious award at a sellout gala ceremony at Harvard
University.
Igs are intended as a bit of a spoof on the more sober Nobel science
prizes.
Other 2012 winners included teams that studied how chimps could
recognise each other from their behinds and why coffee will spill out of
a moving mug.
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But although some of this celebrated research might sound daft, much of
it is intended to tackle real-world problems and gets published in
peer-reviewed, scholarly journals.
Dr Warren, who is a researcher for Unilever in the UK, said he was
thrilled to pick up his Ig.
"I'm amazed that a piece of work I've done has attracted so much
attention," he told BBC News.
"My field, statistical physics, is not something that many will have
heard of, so I'm really pleased we've done something that's caught the
imagination."
His and his co-workers' research produced what has become known as the
"Ponytail Shape Equation".
It takes into account the stiffness of the hair fibres on the head, the
effects of gravity and the presence of the random curliness or waviness
that is ubiquitous in human hair to model how a ponytail is likely to
behave.
Together with a new quantity the team calls the Rapunzel Number, the
equation can be used to predict the shape that hair will take when it is
drawn behind the head and tied together.
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"I've been working on this for a long time," said Dr Warren. "At
Unilever, as you can imagine, there is a lot of interest because we sell
a lot of haircare products. But there are wider applications where you
have a lot of fibres coming together, such as in fabrics.
"I've also wondered if we can contribute something to the whole area of
computer animation. Hair, for example, is something that is very hard to
make look natural in animated movies."
Thursday's Ig Nobel ceremony at Harvard's Sanders Theatre was the 22nd
since the American science humour magazine, Annals of Improbable
Research, started the event.
The gala is always attended by real Nobel Laureates, who are tasked with
handing out the prizes. Recipients get 60 seconds to make an acceptance
speech. If they run over, a young girl will start to shout "boring".
Another tradition is for everyone in the theatre to throw paper planes.
The full list of 2012 Ig Nobel winners:
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Psychology Prize: Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan (Netherlands) and Tulio
Guadalupe (Peru/Russia/Netherlands) for their study Leaning to the Left
Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller.
Peace Prize: The SKN Company (Russia) for converting old Russian
ammunition into new diamonds.
Acoustics Prize: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada (Japan) for creating
the SpeechJammer - a machine that disrupts a person's speech by making
them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.
Neuroscience Prize: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and
George Wolford (US) for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using
complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain
activity anywhere - even in a dead salmon.
Chemistry Prize: Johan Pettersson (Sweden/Rwanada) for solving the
puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden,
people's hair turned green.
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Literature Prize: The US Government General Accountability Office for
issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the
preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.
Physics Prize: Joseph Keller (US), Raymond Goldstein (US/UK), Patrick
Warren and Robin Ball (UK) for calculating the balance of forces that
shape and move the hair in a human ponytail. Prof Keller was
additionally given an Ig for work he contributed to on non-drip teapots
in 1999 but for which he had been wrongly overlooked at the time.
Fluid Dynamics Prize: Rouslan Krechetnikov (US/Russia/Canada) and Hans
Mayer (US) for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what
happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.
Anatomy Prize: Frans de Waal (Netherlands/US) and Jennifer Pokorny (US)
for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees
individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.
Medicine Prize: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti (France) for
advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimise the chance
that their patients will explode.
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