Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Ig Nobel Prizes honor panda poop, gas mask bras

The Annals of Improbable Research again awards its Ig Nobels to those …

Nobel Prize season is right around the corner, which means one thing: it's time for the Annals of Improbable Research to hold its annual bash in Boston, at which it hands out its world famous prizes, the Ig Nobels. These prizes honor the best of the year's research that, according to the Annals, cannot or should not be repeated.

Each year, the awards ceremony features a theme; this year's theme celebrates the recent financial meltdown by celebrating "risk." Benoit Mandelbrot (of "Mandelbrot set" fame), delivered a keynote on risk. This was followed by a performance of "The Big Bank Opera," a work commissioned for this event, and a Big Bank cabaret.

As always, there were a series of 24/7 lectures, in which researchers attempted to explain their work in technical terms within 24 seconds, then provide an explanation for laymen in seven words. This year's lecturers included Stephen Wolfram (speaking on genius), and Nobel Laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who briefly discussed economics.

There's also the annual "Win a date with a Nobel Laureate" contest, and several Laureates, including Krugman and a fellow 2008 winner, Marty Chalfie, handed out the prizes. For reasons that aren't at all clear, a New York attorney named William J. Maloney served as a human V-chip to "guard against offensive words, sounds, thoughts, or imaginings." Randall Munroe, who brings us the webcomic "xkcd," was part of the stage crew that kept everything running smoothly.

The awards

But the real focus was on the Ig Nobels themselves. Keeping with the financial theme, there was an economics award, which went to Icelandic bank executives "for showing how tiny banks can become huge banks, and then become tiny banks again." The math prize also went to a banker, specifically Gideon Gono, who's apparently in charge of the Zimbabwean Reserve Bank. Gono won the prize for rapid adjustments to the country's hyperinflation, which involved the production of "Zimbabwean dollar" bank notes in denominations starting at one cent and running all the way up to 100 trillion.


The peace prize went to researchers from the University of Bern. Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali, and Beat Kneubuehl won for a paper entitled "Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?" Everything about this paper suggests it deserves the award, from the paper's keywords—"Breaking energy threshold; Beer bottles; Blunt head trauma"—to the fact that the last author's name is Beat. (For the curious, both full and empty bottles are sufficient to break skulls.)

The prizes moved from beer to tequila for the chemistry award, which went to the men behind the discovery that it's possible to build thin diamond films could be grown on both stainless steel and silicon using tequila as the carbon source. Take a bow, Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga, and Victor Castano.

The rest of the awards had a distinctly biological slant, including the physics award. That went to Katherine Whitcome, Liza Shapiro, and Daniel Lieberman for "figuring out why pregnant women don't tip over." It's actually a bit more involved than that, as the researchers identified the specific anatomical features that compensate for a shifting center of mass, then trace them all the way back to the Australopithecus species. Hopefully, they'll be able do a similar analysis on the newly announced Ardipithecus skeletons, which seem to be even less specialized for standing upright.

The actual biology award went to a trio of researchers based in Japan, Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei, who were looking for a bacterial species that could rapidly break down organic waste from kitchens. They found it in a place that, in retrospect, makes a degree of sense: giant panda poop.

Along with the rest of the country, the Ig Nobels showed an obsessive attention to health care, handing out awards for veterinary medicine, medicine, and public health. Medicine went to Donald Unger, who published a short letter in Rheumatology back in 1998, which is apparently stuck in the journal's predigital era (all I could find was the table of contents). In it, he described how he cracked his knuckles, but only on one hand, for about 60 years in order to suggest that the warning about the health risks of the habit—it causes arthritis—were overblown. As a result, Unger has been immortalized on nearly every knuckle-cracking FAQ in the Internet.

The public health award honors Elena Bodnar, Raphael Lee, and Sandra Marijan for their patent application, "Garment device convertible to one or more facemasks." What garment device would be Ig Nobel-worthy? From the abstract: "A bra garment comprising: a plurality of detachable cup sections, each of the cup sections having: (a) a filter device; (b) a first portion positionable adjacent to a first central area of a user's chest; (c) a second portion positionable adjacent to a second outer area of the user's chest adjacent to an underarm; and (d) a valve device." Since I know you're too lazy to read the full patent, I'll answer the question I know you're asking: the two cups can be detached, so you don't have to remain check-to-cheek with your fellow gassing victim. Or, if you're alone, you can retain some measure of support.

The veterinary medicine prize went to a pair of researchers, Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson, who used impeccable logic to reason their way to an experiment with a rather amusing conclusion. Starting with the current state of knowledge—"In the scientific literature thus far it is believed that fear of humans is the predominant relationship on dairy farms"—they surveyed the attitudes of farmers towards their herds and found that most consider cows to be intelligent, sensitive animals. It turns out that this sensitivity pays off: "On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case (p < 0.001)."

Finally, the Iggies also handed out a literature prize this year. This went to the Irish police, who were mystified as to how a repeat offender named Prawo Jazdy could pick up 50 tickets for moving violations but have no known address. "Prawo Jazdy" is Polish for "driver's license."

Stay tuned, as the Swedes will be handing out some less amusing hardware shortly.

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