Frustrated beetles and wasabi alarm earn scientists Ig Nobels
Source: Agencies |
October 1, 2011, Saturday
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PROGNOSTICATORS who predicted the end of the world and got it wrong, scientists who built a wasabi fire alarm and researchers who studied how the urge to urinate affects decision-making were among the winners of spoof Ig Nobel prizes on Thursday.
The annual prizes, meant to entertain and encourage scientific research, are awarded by the Journal of Improbable Research as a whimsical counterpart to the Nobel Prizes, which will be announced next week.
The Biology Prize went to entomologists Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz who found the male buprestid beetle likes to copulate with Australian beer bottles called stubbies.
Researchers who showed why discus throwers become dizzy and hammer throwers do not took the Physics Prize.
Former winners of the real Nobel prizes hand out the prizes at a ceremony held at Harvard University in Massachusetts.
A favorite of Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals and architect of the Ig Nobels, is this year's winner of the Public Safety Prize, which went to John Senders of the University of Toronto, Canada.
Senders and colleagues conducted experiments to see how distractions - in this case a helmet with a visor that repeatedly flaps over a person's face - affects attention during highway driving.
"They put this on someone while the visor is blinding them," Abrahams said. Remarkably, the driver fared quite well, Abrahams added.
Peter Snyder, a professor of Neurology at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, was co-winner of the Medicine Prize for studying how the urge to urinate affects decision-making.
Snyder's team set up an experiment in which volunteers did computer tests and then periodically drank 250ml of water as the scientists measured the effects of the volunteers' gradually swelling bladders on attention and working memory. The study found that attention and working memory suffer when you are focused on having to pee.
"When you gotta go, you gotta go," Snyder said.
Japanese researchers scooped the Chemistry Prize for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi - pungent horseradish - to awaken sleeping people and for applying this knowledge to invent a wasabi fire alarm.
The Mathematics Prize went to various prophets of doom who predicted the end of the world on dates from 1954 through to 1999 - for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.
The annual prizes, meant to entertain and encourage scientific research, are awarded by the Journal of Improbable Research as a whimsical counterpart to the Nobel Prizes, which will be announced next week.
The Biology Prize went to entomologists Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz who found the male buprestid beetle likes to copulate with Australian beer bottles called stubbies.
Researchers who showed why discus throwers become dizzy and hammer throwers do not took the Physics Prize.
Former winners of the real Nobel prizes hand out the prizes at a ceremony held at Harvard University in Massachusetts.
A favorite of Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals and architect of the Ig Nobels, is this year's winner of the Public Safety Prize, which went to John Senders of the University of Toronto, Canada.
Senders and colleagues conducted experiments to see how distractions - in this case a helmet with a visor that repeatedly flaps over a person's face - affects attention during highway driving.
"They put this on someone while the visor is blinding them," Abrahams said. Remarkably, the driver fared quite well, Abrahams added.
Peter Snyder, a professor of Neurology at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, was co-winner of the Medicine Prize for studying how the urge to urinate affects decision-making.
Snyder's team set up an experiment in which volunteers did computer tests and then periodically drank 250ml of water as the scientists measured the effects of the volunteers' gradually swelling bladders on attention and working memory. The study found that attention and working memory suffer when you are focused on having to pee.
"When you gotta go, you gotta go," Snyder said.
Japanese researchers scooped the Chemistry Prize for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi - pungent horseradish - to awaken sleeping people and for applying this knowledge to invent a wasabi fire alarm.
The Mathematics Prize went to various prophets of doom who predicted the end of the world on dates from 1954 through to 1999 - for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.
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