Ig Nobel honours work on badger life
CAMBRIDGE: Scientific research into how polyester pants affected the sex life of rats, what it was like for a human to live like a badger and how different the world looked when viewed through your legs, was honoured at this year’s Ig Nobel spoof awards.
The group also took a dig at Volkswagen AG, lauding it in chemistry for engineering its vehicles to produce fewer emissions “whenever the cars are being tested”.
The prizes awarded yesterday for a 26th straight year at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a group of actual Nobel Prize winners, are intended to honour accomplishments in science and humanities that make one laugh, then think.
“The prizes are for something pretty unusual,” said Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, and host of the awards. “Almost any other kind of award is for the best or worst. Best or worst is irrelevant to us.”
Timeliness is also of limited consideration: the Ig Nobel Reproduction Prize went to Ahmed Shafik of Egypt, who died in 2007, for a 1993 paper documenting that rats which wore polyester or polyester-cotton blend pants were less sexually active than those which wore cotton or wool pants or conformed to rat norms and wore no garments of any kind.
The paper suggested that “electrostatic fields” created by polyester pants could play a role in impotence.
Two Britons split this year’s Biology Ig Nobel. Oxford University fellow, Charles Foster, was honoured for his book, Being a Beast, chronicling his experiments in living as a badger, including digging a den to sleep in and eating worms.
Countryman Thomas Thwaites’ work was in a similar vein; he built a set of prosthetic leg extensions to try living like a goat in Switzerland.
Japan’s Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi were granted the Perception Ig Nobel for a paper on how objects looked different when one bent over and viewed them through one’s legs.
Volkswagen’s award was more ignominious, going to the company for equipping its vehicles with a “defeat device”, which activated the emission controls of an engine undergoing government tests and deactivated them afterward. – Reuters