Ig Nobel Awards: Wacky science can have a serious side
We can’t let a year pass without acknowledging the Ig Nobel Awards, those tongue-in-cheek salutes to dubious achievements in science that first make you laugh, and then think.
The gala awards ceremony takes place every September at Harvard before an audience of 1,100 “splendidly eccentric spectators”, where authentic Nobel laureates hand out the prizes.
This year’s prize was 10 tril- lion Zimbabwean dollars, a demonetized currency (a 100 trillion dollar Zimbabwean note is worth about 40 cents, so do the math). Here’s a look at some of this year’s winners.
The anthropology prize went to a multinational European team of researchers for a study at zoos that found that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often, and about as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees. As Tarzan might say, “Cheeta, ungawa!”
A team from Portugal took home the chemistry prize for a study that measured the degree to which human saliva is a good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces. Nothing to spit at.
Another chemistry prize was awarded to German carmaker Volkswagen for “solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the car is being tested”.
The medicine award went to a study in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association that observed the beneficial effects of riding roller coasters to hasten the removal of kidney stones.
Co-author doctor David Wartinger credited the breakthrough to one of his patients, who went to Disney World for spring break and climbed aboard the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad roller coaster. “He rode the ride, got off, and about two minutes later passed a kidney stone,” Wartinger said, adding that the man got on the ride again and two minutes after he got off a second time he passed another stone.
The medical education award went to a Japanese scientist’s paper in Gastrointestinal Endoscopy titled Colonoscopy in the Sitting Position: Lessons learned From Self-Colonoscopy.
The Ig Nobel Peace Prize went to a team in Spain that measured “the frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an automobile”.
A multinational team of scientists from China, the United States, Canada and Singapore received the economics prize for cataloging the benefits of taking out one’s aggression against abusive bosses at the workplace on Voodoo dolls rather than the actual supervisor. What’s that song from School of Rock? — Stick It to the Man?
Co-author of the study, Lindie Liang of Wilfrid Laurier University, said, “I really want to take this opportunity to thank my former boss for teaching me everything about how to deal with abusive bosses.”
A scientist named James Cole received the nutrition prize for calculating that the caloric intake from human cannibalism is significantly lower than it is from most other traditional meats. “It turns out that calorifically, we’re not that nutritious,” Cole said in his acceptance speech.
I stumbled across a candidate for next year’s awards on my own. It was a study done by scientists at no less than Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
They took a certain kind of octopus known for its unfriendliness toward its peers, and then gave them a dose of the street drug known as ecstasy or MDMA. The team “found preliminary evidence of an evolutionary link between the social behaviors of the sea creature and humans, species separated by 500 million years on the evolutionary tree”.
The four drugged octopuses gravitated to a cage holding a fifth.
“They tended to hug the cage and put their mouth parts on the cage,” said Gul Dolen, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Hopkins. “This is very similar to how humans react to MDMA; they touch each other frequently.”
Contact the writer at chrisdavis@ chinadailyusa.com
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