Gas mask in bra wins IgNobel prize

ArticleData Array ( [Article] => Array ( [article_id] => 1103107 [headline] => Gas mask in bra wins IgNobel prize [abstract] => Engineers who invented a bra that converts into a gas mask, and police who wrote tickets to 'Driver's Licence' have had their ingenuity recognised with IgNobel awards. [keywords] => IgNobel, award, prize, science, Nobel Prize, Harvard, bra, gas mask, ticket, Zimbabwe, currency, Iceland, [content] =>

Engineers who invented a bra that converts into a gas mask, pathologists who determined that beer bottles can crack your skull even when empty and police who wrote tickets to 'Driver's Licence' have had their ingenuity recognised with IgNobel awards.

Prizes also went to Zimbabwe for issuing banknotes that range in value from one Zimbabwean cent to 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, to Mexican scientists who made diamonds out of tequila and to the directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks that suffered spectacular collapses.

The IgNobel prizes are a jokey version of the Nobel prizes, awarded every October from Stockholm and Oslo for achievements in a host of disciplines including science and literature.

They are given out by the Harvard University-based humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research.

The Public Health prize went to Elena Bodnar of Hinsdale, Illinois and colleagues who designed and patented a bra that can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to a needy bystander.

Ireland's police won the literature prize from writing more than 50 traffic tickets to a frequent visitor and speeder named Prawo Jazdy. In Polish, this means "driver's licence".

Knuckle-cracking experiment

Pathologist Stephan Bolliger and colleagues at the University of Bern in Switzerland won for a study they did to determine whether an empty beer bottle does more or less damage to the human skull than a full one in a bar fight.

"Both suffice in breaking the human skull. However, the empty ones are more sturdy," Bolliger said by e-mail. This is because the pressure of the beer, aided by carbonation, makes a full beer bottle explode quickly.

Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank which is struggling to fight runaway inflation, won an award "for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers" - from very small to very big - by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one Zimbabwean cent to $100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars.

The economics prize went to managers at Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank and Central Bank of Iceland "for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa".

Donald Unger of California was honoured for a lifelong, experiment in which he cracked the knuckles of his left hand but never his right for more than 60 years to prove that cracking your knuckles does not cause arthritis.

Other winners included farmers who showed that naming your cows makes them give more milk, researchers who used panda droppings to break down household trash and a scientist who calculated why pregnant women do not fall over.

 

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Researchers who discovered that Viagra helps hamsters overcome jet-lag and others who managed to extract vanilla favoring from cow dung were also honoured with gongs at a US ceremony.

The spoof awards, a tongue-in-cheek homage to the Nobel prizes, celebrate some of the more obscure and bizarre scientific discoveries.

The Igs, as they are known, are chosen by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research to highlight scientific papers that, in the words of the magazine, "first make people laugh and then make them think."

Among the winners were a British-US duo who examined the side effects of sword swallowing -- and discovered it causes sore throats -- and a Spanish team who discovered rats can discriminate between Japanese and Dutch spoken backwards.

Chemical weapon

"It was a surprise, it was the last thing we expected," said Nuria Sebastian-Galles, one of the Barcelona team of scientists, of the findings. The awards, she said, "bring out the freak inside most scientists."

Past winners have included the creator of the plastic pink flamingo, the inventor of an alarm clock that runs and hides and a researcher who reported the first known case of homosexual necrophiliac behavior in the mallard duck.

Research highlighted by this year's awards ranged from a study of how sheets wrinkle and how the word "the" causes headaches for indexes to why humans can't stop eating when presented with an apparently endless bowl of soup.

Also honored was a Taiwanese man who patented a device to net bank robbers.

The prestigious peace prize was given to a US Air Force laboratory for researching what the committee dubbed the "gay bomb" -- a chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.

Vanilla flavouring

Japanese researcher Mayu Yamamoto, who received the chemistry Ig, got an additional honor: a local ice cream shop created a new flavor, the "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist," to honor her work extracting vanilla flavouring from cow dung.

The winners were permitted just 60 seconds to give their acceptance speeches, on pain of interruption by an eight-year-old girl, who traditionally signals the time limit by repeatedly shouting "Please stop, I'm bored."

The Ig Nobels have often targeted what are perceived to be wasteful projects and some scientists have complained that the satirical awards unfairly tarnish legitimate research.

However, many researchers welcome the chance to talk about their work.

Seven of the 10 winners this year paid their own way to accept their awards, which were handed out by six real Nobel Laureates.
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