The gas mask bra, one winner of the coveted prize
The ten IgNobel awards have just been awarded in front of a crowd of leading experts. The awards were set up in 1991 by the Annals of Improbable research to hail scientific research that ‘”that cannot, or should not, be reproduced’ and have the effect of to ‘first make people laugh, and then make them think’. This means that the awards go the oddest, the strangest scientific research they can find that has been published in academic journals.
This years winners include Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, for research showing that when farmers name cows, they produce more milk. The Peace Prize went to a team from Bern University who hit each other over the head with beer bottles to produce ‘Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?’ TheNacional Autónoma de México, was celebrated for creating diamonds from tequila. Environmentalists had something to celebrate when Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara , Japan demonstrated that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas. Civil defence advocates can only applaud Elena N.Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, Illinois, USA, for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.
Other awards were more satirical than scientific as the Literature Prize was awarded to the Irish Police Service in recognition of their writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country —Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means “Driving License” and the Economics Prize went to The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks —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 — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.
The journal has been recording and having fun with science and scientists for many years and their research includes producing an astrology chart for bacteria and a paper written by over a hundred scientists that was published under the title ‘The Effects of Peanut Butter on the Rotation of the Earth’ in which they concluded that “So far as we can determine, peanut butter has no effect on the rotation of the earth.”
So, for all your mad science needs, check out www.improbable.com
