With all of the attention and excitement that the Nobel Prize announcements this week have attracted, a smaller celebration of science honored some intriguing and fairly humorous work. Recognizing work that may never win recognition from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Ig Nobel Prizes demonstrate the lighter side of science and academia.
Presented at Harvard University on Sept. 29 and organized by the science satire journal Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobels honor work in the sciences, medicine, literature, peace and public safety. While you might think deeply when examining the work of this week's Nobel laureates, these awards will give you some equally deep thoughts as well as a good laugh.
Here's a recap of this year's winners:
Biology Prize: Back in 1985, Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz discovered that males of an Australian beetle species were very attracted to a certain line of beer bottles. The males mistook the bottles for female beetles because of their color and attempted to mate with the bottles.
Chemistry Prize: While fire alarms typically rely on a really loud sound and flashing strobes, a team of Japanese scientists came up with an alarm that uses wasabi vapors. The group identified a high enough airborne concentration of the Japanese horseradish that can awaken sleeping individuals, designed an alarm around it, and filed a patent back in 2009.
Literature Prize: Ever wondered how you can channel your procrastination successfully? So did John Perry, a philosophy professor at Stanford University, whose Theory of Structured Procrastination encourages people to do something important as a means of not doing something even more important.
Mathematics Prize: A number of individuals, including Pat Robertson and Harold Camping, share this year's prize, which recognized the importance of taking care when making mathematical assumptions and calculations. Cumulatively the awardees have predicted the world would end in 1954, 1982, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1999 and 2011. How many times have you lived through the apocalypse?
Medicine Prize: Ever wonder how your thinking changes when your bladder is really, really full? A team of researchers from Europe, the U.S., and Australia tested people's ability to make decisions while they had a strong urge to locate a rest room. Among differences found in their decision making processes, participants who had to urinate really badly were more likely to put off receiving a reward than those whose bladders were content.
Peace Prize: If you thought getting your car towed was bad enough if you parked illegally, check out an alternative mode of enforcement by Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania. In a video posted on Youtube, Zuokas uses an armored tank to run over a luxury car illegally parked on one of Vilnius's streets.
Physics Prize: Discus throwers and hammer throwers both spin around in their events, yet only discus throwers get dizzy. Researchers from France and The Netherlands found that this is due to a visual impairment that occurs when discus throwers spin around, causing them to lose their bearings that prevent them from becoming dizzy.
Physiology Prize: Are yawns really contagious? Not in Red-Footed Tortoises according to a group of researchers from the UK and Austria. By testing these tortoises for signs of contagious yawning through several mechanisms, they concluded that a contagious yawn involves complex social processes rather than being the result of some simple action pattern.
Psychology Prize: Why do we sigh? Karl Halvor Teigen addressed that question in a study he published back in 2008. He found that the act of sighing is an unintentional expression of "an activity, plan or desire that has to be discarded, creating a pause before it can be replaced by a novel initiative."
Public Safety Prize: While the odds of any of us driving a convertible with a visor repeatedly flapping down in front of our eyes is quite low, John Senders of the University of Toronto demonstrated how a visual obstruction repeated blocking his vision alters his ability to drive safely on I-495 outside of Boston.
