This week Harvard U hosted the Ig Nobel Prize
awards ceremony in their Sanders Theater (1,2). The awards are highly prized by
they scientists who win them (well by and large) and the science is fun to read
about.
Anna Wilkinson and her team for their work on the
lack of contagious yawning among their tortoises, but not their students won the
Ig Nobel Award for Physiology. My blog post on their paper was on May 3rd
this year.
My personal favorite was the winners of the Biology
prize. Daryl Gwynne and David Rentz from the land of barbies and the amber
fluid scooped this one for their papers on the confusion of the male Buprestid
beetles who try to make love with the empties after the party’s over. They
restrict their amorous advances to the stubbies on brown beer bottles. The
bottles have to be empty, of course, as full ones would be ice-cold in the
cooler.
The Chemistry Prize went to the guys at Shiga U for
their work on using aerosolized wasabi to wake the deaf in case of fire.
The prize for Medicine was shared this year between
Tuk of Twente and Snyder of Brown. Their issue was self-control. Mirjam Tuk
asked people to make decisions when they were needing to urinate very urgently.
The better able you are to hang on and not rush off to the bathroom, the better
you can control your other impulses – while using your mind for cognitive
tasks, that is, rather than on giving a piece of your mind to those preventing
your access to relief.
The other prizes are all equally exciting, but the
bravest must surely be John Senders’ Prize for Public Safety by sending his “lab
rat" driving cars down a freeway with a loosened visors flapping in their face
and completely obscuring their vision (3).
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/ig-nobel-prizes
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15117051
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOguslSPpqo
