Ig Nobels 2006

[Xar]

Well, like every year, the Annals of Improbable Research assigned the Ig Nobel prizes, for achievements that "cannot and should not be reproduced", or, as Science put it, "things that first make you laugh, and then make you think". The winners this year are:

ORNITHOLOGY: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.

NUTRITION: Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters, through their report "Dung Preference of the Dung Beetle Scarabaeus cristatus Fab (Coleoptera-Scarabaeidae) from Kuwait".

PEACE: Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant -- a device that makes annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults; and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers.

ACOUSTICS: D. Lynn Halpern (of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, and Brandeis University, and Northwestern University), Randolph Blake (of Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University) and James Hillenbrand (of Western Michigan University and Northwestern University) for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.

MATHEMATICS: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.

LITERATURE: Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University for his report "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly."

MEDICINE: Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage"; and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, for their subsequent medical case report also titled "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage."

PHYSICS: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces.

CHEMISTRY: Antonio Mulet, José Javier Benedito and José Bon of the University of Valencia, Spain, and Carmen Rosselló of the University of Illes Balears, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, for their study "Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature."

BIOLOGY: Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Centre, Tanzania, and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna Austria) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.

For more information about the Ig Nobel prizes, past winners, and references to the works of the aforementioned winners, here's the official website:

improbable.com/

[stonemaybe]

[Fist and Faith]

I gotta find out about the spaghetti!!!

[Avatar]

The fingernail scraping one.

I'm guessing woodpeckers have shock-absorbers of some kind.

--A

[Xar]

I thought the Literature prize would be mentioned by somebody, given Donaldson's vocabulary

[Avatar]

Haha, it's a weakness I probably suffer from myself, so I decided not to draw attention to it.

--A

[[Syl]]

If I was single, the medical prize would make a great pickup line. Probably not an effective one, but...

"Hey, I see you have hiccups."

[Xar]

And what about the teenager repellant? When your teenaged children invite their friends at your place, and you'd really just want some quiet... turn it on and watch them run

[stonemaybe]

That's more or less exactly what it was developed for - I remember seeing it on the BBC news a few months ago. There's been lots in the news recently about teenagers hanging around people's houses and giving them abuse - and in a couple of cases stabbing people when they complained - so you set this gizmo off outside your house, it doesn't disturb the neighbours, but it gets rid of the kids hanging around!

Edit - Thought about the SRD thing with the literature prize, but then realised every single award merited a comment and I was feeling lazy, so it just got a )

[Trapper]

MEDICINE: Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage"; and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, for their subsequent medical case report also titled "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage."

There's always ONE isn't there? Whatever is being said about him, I think Mark Foley would have funded this research.