Roy Exum
Every year a humorous scientific magazine, known as the Annals of Improbable Research, presents what is called the Ig Nobel Awards. The awards are each a satirical response, of course, to the much-lauded Nobel Prizes and, believe it or not, the winners actually did scientific and exhaustive research to support their funny findings.
This year’s category was food and, when the recipients were honored at Harvard University last Thursday night, you have to admit some deep thinking accompanied the laughter.
Each winner had no more than 60 seconds to accept the awards because that would be just awful. So here are the 2014 winners:
NEUROSCIENCE -- Four scientists from China -- Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian and Kang Lee – took top honors for their meticulous research on a project called "Seeing Jesus in Toast." Led by Dr. Lee of the University of Toronto, the group charted what happens to the brains of people when they see human faces appear on a slice of toast. Note: those who volunteered saw faces four percent of the time and letters 38 percent of the time.
PHYSICS –The peels of a dozen Cavendish bananas were tested five times each by a team of health and medical workers at Kitasato University in Japan to conclusively prove the peels are really slippery, much more than apple peels and lemon peels. It seems when a human foot hits a discarded banana peel, the skin of the fruit releases a gel-like substance from the discarded skins’ “follicles” and, brother, down you’ll go. In an aside, team members got to eat the bananas before stomping on the skins.
PSYCHOLOGY -- Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones and Minna Lyons have proven that people who stay up late at night are more self-admiring, more manipulative, and more psychopathic than those who get up much earlier to begin their day. Researchers found that “night owls” – not a scientific term -- scored high in “narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism,” which is known to psychologists as “The Dark Triad.”
PUBLIC HEALTH – In a rare dual award, two different groups charted ground-breaking advances in whether it is “mentally hazardous” to own a cat. They were Jaroslav Flegr, Jan Havlicek and Jitka Hanusova-Lindova, and to David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan and Lisa Seyfried. Dr. Hanauer, of the department of pediatrics at the University of Michigan, acknowleged, “It may simply be the people with depression get cats because they feel depressed. I am in no way telling people to get rid of their cats.”
BIOLOGY: A crowd of 12 very smart people discovered that dogs can actually sense the earth’s Magnetic field, and demonstrate it when an animal circles to align their bodies along a north-south axis when they poop. Published in the Frontiers in Zoology Magazine, the finds were based on 70 dogs representing 37 breeds that took 1,893 dumps. Want to know where the magnetic field is in your yard? Just watch Rover. Hoooray for Vlastimil Hart, Petra Novakova, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladimir Hanzal, Milos Jezek, Tomas Kusta, Veronika Nemcova, Jana Adamkova, Katerina Benediktova, Jaroslav Cerveny and Hynek Burda.
ART: In a fascinating find, Italian researchers Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro and Paolo Livrea used powerful laser beams on the hands of a dozen volunteers to find out that admiring beautiful paintings distracted the amount of relative pain people suffer while looking at ugly paintings. So-so paintings? Not so much.
ECONOMICS: Italy's National Institute of Statistics determined a simple way to make the country’s economy bigger – was easy to do – just start including the dollar value “produced from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling, and other unlawful financial transactions.” It’s a no-brainer.
MEDICINE: A rare blood disorder named Glanzmann thrombasthenia can make a severe nosebleed fatal but doctors at Michigan State packed the nostrils of a 4-year-old girl with “nasal tampons” made of cured salted pork and “saved the kid’s bacon.” Really. Later the doctors admitted the nosebleed trick goes back to the 1880s but Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin were honored just the same. They also warned that if you try this at home, it could cause an infection.
ARCTIC SCIENCE: Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestol, two scientists at the University of Oslo, worried that climate change is causing reindeer to be attacked more frequently by polar bears so they had an idea which proved worthy. Instead of dressing rescuers up in outdoor gear, they studied what would happen if they costumed humans as polar bears. It worked like a charm, the reindeer ran much faster. The report did not say what a polar bear will do when its sees humans dressed as a polar bear.
NUTRITION: A team of Spanish scientists has learned that the RNA found in the poop of human babies includes 109 strains of lactic acid bacteria and six strains of Lactobacillus. Viola! Three of the Lactobacillus RNA can be used as Probiotic starter cultures to ferment sausages … you know, like you eat at breakfast. Saquel Rubio, Anna Jofra, Belen Martin, Teresa Aymerich and Margarita Garriga were duly applauded. I’ll stick to bacon -- it can also cure nosebleeds.
Let’s hear it for our scientific heroes!
royexum@aol.com