The IgNobel Prizes 2010

Reading science is always alive for me but I do not have laughs as long as the ones I have come the awarding of the IgNobel prizes. The IgNobel Award is on its 20th year. It is for research that “first make people laugh then make them think.” This event is ticklishly 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. This year’s awards happened last Sept. 30 and aside from past winner Dr. Elena Bodnar making a demonstration of her invention — the bra that turns into two face masks — a few days before the actual event, this year’s event recognized research that reached new heights, literally. This was proven by the IgNobel award for engineering which was given to Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for “perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.” Their study was entitled “A Novel Non-Invasive Tool for Disease Surveillance of Free-Ranging Whales and Its Relevance to Conservation Programs,” published in Animal Conservation, vol. 13, no. 2, April 2010, pp. 217-25.  

And if you think this year’s awardees only went to scientists who care about big animals, you should know that the IgNobel for Transportation and Planning went to Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, and Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK for revealing an extraordinary ability that your navigating mind might not have but that slime molds possess. They found that slime molds can find the optimal routes for railroad tracks. Some of them won the IgNobel in 2008 for research that revealed that slime molds can solve maze puzzles. Their paper is called “Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design,” published in Science, vol. 327, no. 5964, Jan. 22, 2010, pp. 439-42.

The IgNobel awardees for Biology dealt with animals, too, but it was something a bit strange dear but true dear. The research was quite kinky and the scientists involved would probably be on the firing list for excommunication of our local bishops now if it were not for the fact that the study was on fruit bats. Scientists Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, actually documented the stimulation of bat penises (fellatio). The study is entitled “Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time,” and published in PLoS ONE, vol. 4, no. 10, e7595.

The IgNobel for Medicine and Physics dealt with studies that promote human health, I think. The one for medicine uncovered the power of a roller coaster ride over your breathing problems. It goes to a research entitled “Rollercoaster Asthma: When Positive Emotional Stress Interferes with Dyspnea Perception,” by Simon Rietveld and Ilja van Beest, published in Behaviour Research and Therapy, vol. 45, 2006, pp. 977–87. It concludes that asthma may just get better with a roller-coaster ride. The IgNobel for Physics went to something quite “sneaky” because it demonstrated that if people had their socks on outside of their shoes on icy footpaths during the winter, they would slip and fall less often. New Zealand researchers won that award and they were Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest for their paper “Preventing Winter Falls: A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Novel Intervention,” that appeared in the New Zealand Medical Journal, vol. 122, no. 1298, July 3, 2009, pp. 31-8. The IgNobel Peace Prize, too, I thought should have been awarded the Medicine IgNobel since they proved that swearing alleviates pain, giving scientific and medical sanction for people to swear. It went to Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK for their study entitled “Swearing as a Response to Pain,” published in Neuroreport, vol. 20, no. 12, 2009, pp. 1056-60. For Public Health, the IgNobel award goes to scientists who figured there was something else lurking in bearded scientists besides their charm and they are microbes! The award goes to Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety Office, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, for their revealing paper “Microbiological Laboratory Hazard of Bearded Men,” published in Applied Microbiology, vol. 15, no. 4, July 1967, pp. 899–906.

The Chemistry IgNobel was timely in the light of the BP oil spill. They actually disproved that oil and water don’t mix which was actually the BIG problem with the spill. It went to Eric Adams of MIT, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University, Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii, and BP (British Petroleum) and this revelation, if you can find it in the 500+ page document and understand it is entitled “Review of Deep Oil Spill Modeling Activity Supported by the Deep Spill JIP and Offshore Operator’s Committee. Final Report,” Eric Adams and Scott Socolofsky, 2005.

The Management IgNobel Prize was for a computational study that seemed like that churned out in the series “Numbers.” It is like crossing the lottery with the sitcom “The Office.” The study was done by Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy and it demonstrated that company efficiency would improve if people promoted people at random. So to employees who think merit need not be a requirement for promotion, this is the paper to cite: “The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,” Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp. 467-72. The Economic Prize was no contest. It went, of course, to the executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for “creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.”  

So for those who think that science is serious, you bet it is. If it were not, it would just simply be a giant tissue paper wiping out snot from whales.

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