2012 Ig Nobel Prizes honor real, but offbeat research
By Jon Gold,
Network World |
Sep 21, 2012 8:28 AM
PT
Groundbreaking research into monkey butts, green hair, diamonds and dead fish was honored this year.
This year’s Ig Nobel Prize, handed out Thursday night in Cambridge, Mass., offered up the usual cavalcade of faffing around, silliness and genuinely puzzling scientific advancement. Here are the 10 winners.
RELATED: 2011 Ig Noble Prize winners
Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan, Tulia Guadeloupe discovered that leaning to the left, while looking at the Eiffel Tower, made the famous structure appear smaller. No, they don’t actually appear to know why.
SKN Company of Russia took home this prize for a system that can turn old firearms ammunition into diamond. Admittedly, very small amounts of diamond, but hey, it’s still better than having a load of old bullets hanging around.
Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller and George Wolford demonstrated that even scientists sometimes find only what they’re looking for by showing apparent fMRI activity in the brain of a dead salmon. Insert your favorite joke about “interestingly, they still got no results from [politician name]” here.
Johan Pettersson figured out why blonde-haired people were seeing their hair turn green – copper pipes in showers in newer buildings. What’s funny is that this would’ve been my scientifically illiterate guess, had I even known this phenomenon existed.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (which didn’t attend) won this for preparing a report about reports about reports – and recommending a further report. Can’t argue with that.
Ruslan Krechetnikov discovered that average-sized coffee mugs are exactly the right size to create a lot of sloshing when being carried by someone walking at an average rate of speed. I knew it.
Kazutaka Kurihara and Koki Tsukada of Japan developed a speech jammer that repeats your own words back to you after a slight delay, making it much more difficult to speak. I’d like to combine this with some kind of neural interface when I ride the MBTA.
Joseph Keller, Raymond Goldstein, Patrick Warren and Robin Ball calculated the balance of forces that move the hair in a ponytail. Much of the U.S. gymnastics team was interested, but some members were still unimpressed.
Franz de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny figured out that chimpanzees can match pictures of familiar individuals’ faces (other chimpanzees, I hasten to add) to their posteriors.
Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti discovered ways to prevent patients from exploding during colonoscopy. I have no idea why this wasn’t an actual Nobel Prize, and am coincidentally really scared now.
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