Hiccups Cured By Bum Scratching: It's Science!
MayorBob.
Posted to SciTech on Thu Oct 12, 2006 at 11:36:41 AM EST. RSS.
It's that time of year again. No, not North America's version of a world championship baseball tournament. It's time for one of the most esteemed prizes in science. No, not the Nobel Prizes in a couple of scientific disciplines. We're talking a harmonic convergence of highly esteemed and highly entertaining. For the 16th straight year, the Ig Nobel awards were handed out a group of worthy recipients.
Who wouldn't be excited to be in the hall at Harvard University when the recipients of this year's celebration of "the quirkier side of serious scientific endeavour" were called out? As Marc Abrahams, the man behind the Ig Nobels, put it they honor "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." So what, you might ask, made them laugh and think in 2006? The Math prize was given to a group of Aussies who figured out a formula for how many photos you'd have to take of a group to be sure that all the subjects had their eyes open. The prize for Acoustics went to a group of Americans who researched why fingernails on chalkboard was such an irritating sound. The prize in Physics went to two Frenchmen who figured out the scientific basis for why you can't neatly snap dry spaghetti in half. The Chemistry prize also had a food angle, that being the Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature. The prize in Medicine was given out for development of a technique to cure hiccups through digital rectal massage. The award for Literature went to a Princeton academic who published a research article on the perils of using too many long words - paper done using a lot of long words, of course. Other Ig Nobels handed out included:
The night's crowning award was the Peace Prize. This went to Howard Stapleton, from Wales, who invented a device which emits an irritating sound. Yes, the sound emitted by Stapleton's invention The Mosquito is even more irritating than fingernails on chalkboard. It has to be, as its expressed purpose is annoying teenagers to the point that they don't congregate where The Mosquito is located. If you want to know what previous winners have been feted for, a complete list of all the prior years' recipients and what they did that earned them an Ig Nobel can be found here.
edited by Port1080
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