October 1, 2004
STYLE & CULTURE
Advances in weird science
By Roy Rivenburg, Times Staff Writer
If a herring asks you to pull his finger, be very afraid. That's one of the lessons derived from this year's Ig Nobel awards ceremony, an event that honors offbeat scientific achievements.
The winners were announced Thursday at a boisterous Harvard gala featuring Hula Hoop demonstrations, opera performances and scientists belting out karaoke.
The honorees included:
• A scientific investigation of the "Five-Second Rule," which claims it's safe to eat food that has been dropped on the floor if you pick it up within five seconds.
• A patent for bald spot comb-overs.
• A study that linked suicide with listening to country music.
• Research that suggests herring communicate by "breaking wind."
This was the 14th year for the Ig Nobels, which should not be confused with the more distinguished Nobel Prizes issued from Sweden. Ig Nobels are bestowed for accomplishments that "first make people laugh, then make them think," says Marc Abrahams, the guiding light behind the awards.
In the past, winners haven't been sure whether to feel elated or insulted about being selected. But this year's crop of Ig Nobelists seems mostly thrilled. Of the 10 winners, eight traveled to Boston at their own expense (or sent representatives) to collect their prize, a handcrafted trophy that is "always made of extremely cheap materials," Abrahams says. This year's trophy is a fake box of cereal called Ig Nobel-O's.
In the physics category, the prize went to Ramesh Balasubramaniam and Michael T. Turvey for their landmark study on "Coordination Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping," a scholarly analysis of the bodily movements necessary to keep a Hula Hoop in motion.
"I don't think anyone had mapped the physics of the Hula Hoop," says Balasubramaniam, a professor of human kinetics at the University of Ottawa in Canada.
Among the study's conclusions: Successful Hula Hoopers use "vertical suspensory activity" and "spatiotemporal patterning" of the lower limbs to keep the hoop "in steady oscillation parallel with the ground plane." Undoubtedly, this tip will show up in future instruction manuals issued by Wham-O.
Balasubramaniam admits his research might sound goofy, but says studying how the brain orchestrates such a complex task can pave the way for advances in robotics and rehabilitation of stroke victims.
However, the exhaustive analysis hasn't enabled Balasubramaniam to master the toy. "I'm terrible at it," he confessed in a telephone interview before the award ceremony.
The youngest Ig Nobel winner, 17-year-old Jillian Clarke, took the public health prize for researching the so-called Five-Second Rule during an internship at the University of Illinois.
To find out whether it really is safe to eat food that is quickly rescued after falling to the ground, she first tested bacteria levels on various floors at the university. "We took swabs from every floor on campus," she says. "Cafeterias, elevators, bathrooms, dorms."
To her surprise, no bacteria were detected. Next, she deliberately contaminated a few tiles with E. coli, then placed Gummi Bears and cookies on the tiles for several seconds. Result: The bacteria jumped to the food.
To round out the study, Clarke conducted a survey that found women were more likely than men to eat food that had been retrieved from the floor.
Perhaps the weirdest entry was a study on flatulent fish. Ben Wilson, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, was toiling in his lab one evening when an unexpected noise emanated from the herring aquarium. "At first, I thought someone was hiding in the cupboard pulling a prank," he recalls.
But when he turned up the volume on a microphone in the tank, the "raspberry" sound continued, accompanied by tiny air bubbles from the herrings' rear ends.
Next came a scientific journal article, and the delicate task of figuring out how to describe the passing of gas "without sounding too silly." Wilson and his colleagues devised such synonyms as "burst pulse sounds," "digestive system venting" and "bubble expulsion from the anal duct region."
Proving that great minds think alike, two Scandinavian researchers also stumbled across the phenomenon and also published a paper, on "herring bubble release."
Both teams theorized that herring, which possess a "very sophisticated" sense of hearing, were breaking wind as a form of communication.
It didn't take long for the jokes to start. "What, exactly, would a herring need to communicate?" wrote Miami Herald humor columnist Dave Barry. "I mean, we're talking about creatures with roughly the same IQ as a Tic Tac. They are not down there discussing Marcel Proust."
An ex-cop and his deceased father captured the Ig Nobel in engineering for their 1977 patent on a process to camouflage baldness.
"Like most of our good ideas, this one came over a gallon of homemade wine," says Donald J. Smith, 66.
The plan was to sell an instruction manual for the three-step comb-over method and a secret spray formula that held the hair in place. But the scheme never got off the ground.
Today, the patent is worthless, Smith says. Unless, of course, he sues Donald Trump for stealing it. "His hairstyle does look like my patent," Smith notes.
The 2004 psychology prize was nabbed by a pair of professors for a visual perception experiment called "Gorillas in Our Midst." It showed that when people are asked to focus on small details, they can miss the bigger picture, such as a man in a gorilla suit walking right through their line of sight. Videos of their experiments are posted at
http://viscog.Beckman.uiuc.edu/djslab/demos.html.
The most disputed Ig Nobel was the medicine prize, for a journal article titled "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide." The report discovered suicide rates were higher in cities with a lot of country radio stations and suggested the downbeat themes in country lyrics pushed some listeners over the edge.
However, the conclusions were widely denounced — by country musicians (no surprise) and by fellow sociologists, who said the methodology was flawed.
The coveted Ig Nobel peace prize was given to the inventor of the karaoke machine, for presenting humanity with a new venue for "learning to experience and tolerate each other's limitations." Daisuke Inoue, who is widely blamed for the invention and who was recognized by Time magazine as one of Asia's most influential figures (along with Mao Tse-tung and Gandhi), was scheduled at press time to fly from Japan to accept his Ig Nobel.
No-shows at Thursday's award ceremony included Coca-Cola Co., which received the chemistry prize for inadvertently adding carcinogens to the British version of its Dasani bottled water, and the Vatican, which won the economics award for "outsourcing prayers to India."
According to news reports, a shortage of priests in America and Europe created a backlog of requests for Masses to be offered in memory of loved ones. To ease the crunch, some requests were routed to priests in India. However, several church officials said the "outsourcing" story was exaggerated. The practice of donating money for overseas Masses dates back centuries, and is commonly used by Roman Catholics to support missionary activities in poor nations, they explained.
