Last updated: October 2006
“If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel prize, and especially if you did; better luck next year.”

The Ig Nobel awards are attracting greater attention from the press each year and are quickly approaching the somewhat stuffy and more prestigious Nobel awards for column inches.

After-all, the papers do have a passion for feasting upon the quirkier side of life, but who are we to cast aspersions about that?! The 2006 awards brought the usual line-up of unusual research and dubious experimentation. Science is a wonderful thing and at times should certainly not be taken too seriously. We take a look at the best of this year’s inquisitive investigations that first make you laugh and then make you think.

Peace.
Welsh engineer Howard Stapleton of Compound Security Systems in Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales, took this year’s Ig Nobel award for Peace having invented his electronic teenager repellent. The ingenious gadget is designed to disperse loitering gangs by emitting a piercing shriek only they can hear.

“We discovered that, even at relatively low volumes, the right frequency noise would only be heard by 25s and below and it was highly annoying after five minutes,” Mr Stapleton said. “The Mosquito was born.”

The Mosquito exploits an ageing effect that sees our ability to hear high frequency sounds dwindle as we get older. In our teens, we can typically hear sounds ranging from 20Hz to 20kHZ, but with age, the highest frequencies we can hear drops, sometimes to 18kHz or less.

Tests of the £580 unit at a local Spar shop in Barry, south Wales, last year were declared a success when teenagers that congregated outside the premises pleaded with the owner, Robert Gough, to turn it off. Older customers were reported to be oblivious to the high-pitched shriek. The box, mounted on a wall outside the shop, was programmed to emit an 80-decibel pulse of high frequency sound that cleared an area up to 15 metres away.

Interest in the unit has been huge. Mr Morris said; “This has gone absolutely ballistic ... We are getting phone calls from shops and councils from the south coast to the other side of Edinburgh.”

Acoustics.
An Ig Nobel award under the banner of Acoustics went to US scientists for their work on the mystery of why fingernails scraped against a blackboard produces the sound so commonly found excruciating. The team, led by D. Lynn Halpern of Northwestern University in Chicago, found that the noise topped a list of annoying sounds and revealed that it remains deeply unpleasant even if the high-pitched squeals are digitally silenced.

The study, entitled ‘Psychoacoustics of Chilling Sound’, was published in the journal Perception and Psychophysics but failed to answer the pressing question of why the sound is so shudder-inducing, “Still unanswered, however, is the question of why this and related sounds are so grating to the ear,” the authors wrote.

Ornithology.
Awards founder Dr Abrahams was particularly enamoured of the winners who for the first time garnered an award from The Annals of Improbable Research from within the realms of ornithology saying it was classic Ig Nobel territory.

“It epitomises what the Ig Nobels do every now and again - the moment they hear the question, they’re happy that somebody has put the question into words and they’re even happier that someone’s begun to answer it,” he said. “This prize will give new meaning to the old phrase, to rack your brains.”

The scientists in this investigation endeavoured to find out how woodpeckers avoid headaches. Their research, published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, followed studies of head injuries in woodpeckers from the 1970s. They revealed how the answer lies in how a woodpecker’s skull and brain are arranged: the muscles around the sensitive brain tissues make a woodpecker’s head function like a perfect shock absorber. Powerful muscles contract a millisecond before each strike, creating a tight but cushioned structure during the moment of impact that distributes the force of the blow.

Ivan Schwab, who delivered his acceptance speech while wearing a woodpecker head-dress, shared the prize for authoring ‘Cure for a Headache’ with the late psychiatrist Phillip R.A. May, whose previous research formed the basis for the study. Woodpeckers interested May and Schwab because the birds do not experience retinal detachments, brain damage and spinal cord injuries, damage that one would expect as a result from the birds’ repeated hammering. In his study, Schwab noted that North America’s largest woodpecker may strike a tree at the rate of 20 times a second and up to 12,000 times a day, with forces as high as 1200 g’s with each impact.

“That is equivalent to striking a wall at 16 miles an hour - face first - each time,” Schwab wrote.

Medicine.
Many cures for hiccups have been proposed over the years, from drinking a glass of water at the wrong side of the glass to applying a swift and hearty surprise, but there could be no cure more surprising to the sufferer than this one documented by three Israeli scientists.

In tests carried out upon a 60-year-old man with seemingly incurable hiccups, the team found that one particular method brought almost instantaneous results… digital rectal massage. There’s no nicer way of saying it; they shoved a finger up his bum and found that that really did the trick.

“Several manoeuvres were attempted, but with no success,” their paper explains. “Digital rectal massage was then performed resulting in abrupt cessation of the hiccups. Recurrence of the hiccups occurred several hours later, and again, they were terminated immediately with digital rectal massage.”

Their findings matched that of an earlier report by Francis Fesmire, a doctor at Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who they shared their award with.
He treated a patient in the emergency room who suffered from hiccups every two seconds for three days. After various other attempts, Fesmire, goodness knows why, resorted to inserting his finger up the patient’s anus. He found that applying a slow circular motion of the finger stopped the hiccups within seconds.

“I want to make it clear, I’ve done this once to a patient,” Fesmire said. “It worked, and I was pleased. I have no desire to do it again.”

Fesmire proudly walked out to collect his award with the famed exploratory digit held high.

Mathematics.
Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation strove to discover how many shots would need to be taken of a large group photograph in order that none of the participants would be pictured blinking.

“Anyone who’s played photographer at family functions knows that, even if everyone stays perfectly still, there’s always someone who blinks.” Occasional photographer Nic Svenson wrote, “I wondered just how many shots I’d have to take to get one where no-one’s blinking.”

“It turns out that the average number of blinks made by someone getting their photo taken is ten per minute. The average blink lasts about 250 milliseconds and, in good indoor light, a camera shutter stays open for about eight milliseconds. When sorting out probabilities, you have to consider what might influence them.”

“If a group of people are looking at a camera, one person’s blinks won’t influence another’s and, unless you’ve got something in your eye, your blinks don’t influence each other either. It’s also safe to say that blinks are random; they don’t happen every six seconds. This means we’re looking for the probability of a random event - a blink - occurring during a window of time - how long the shutter’s open - that’s much shorter than the event itself.”

Formulating a curved graph based on a variety of probabilities and expectations the pair considered the variables within trial situations including both good and bad light scenarios. They then figured out how many shots one would need to be 99% certain of getting a good one. They found that photographing thirty people in bad light would need about thirty shots. Once there are around fifty people in the photograph, even in good light, they suggest you can kiss your hopes of an unspoilt photo goodbye.
Their general rule of thumb for calculating the number of photos to take for groups of less than 20 goes as follows: divide the number of people by three if there’s good light and two if the light’s bad.

Literature.
Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University claimed an award for his study entitled: ‘Consequences of erudite vernacular utilised irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly’, one that might be of particular interest to readers of this newspaper.

“Most texts on writing style encourage authors to avoid overly-complex words,” his study explains. “However, a majority of undergraduates admit to deliberately increasing the complexity of their vocabulary so as to give the impression of intelligence. This paper explores the extent to which this strategy is effective.”
The psychologist added complexity to existing samples of writing, inserting needlessly long words into a chunk of text, his aim being to assess readers’ reactions to the excessive prose.

Oppenheimer explains of his findings; “The problem is that this strategy backfires. Such writing is reliably judged to come from less intelligent authors. Back when I was a graduate student, I graded a lot of student papers, and I hated slogging through thesaurus-heavy writing. And yet, students kept turning it in. It made me curious as to whether my intuitions were typical. So I decided to test it.”

Oppenheimer followed his own advice with his acceptance speech.
Upon accepting the award he said, “My research shows that conciseness is interpreted as intelligence. So, thank you.”

Nutrition.
Kuwaiti scientists claimed the Ig Nobel for Nutrition by uncovering the surprisingly picky eating habits of dung beetles. The beetles scavenge for droppings of various animals and suck out the liquid. Then they roll the remains to a favourable spot, where they bury it and lay their eggs inside, providing both a home and a feast for their larvae. But the researchers found that not just any dung will do.

“They prefer the horse dung, and then the sheep, and then the camel at the end, because the horse dung, it has more liquid,” said Faten Al-Mussalam who studied the beetles for her masters degree in biology and now works for the Kuwaiti Environmental Public Authority. Al-Mussalam put her work in perspective, pointing out that the ancient Egyptians revered the beetle as a holy creature.

Other award winners included:
Biology - a group of scientists who showed that a particular species of mosquito is equally attracted to smelly feet as it is to Limburger cheese. They hit on using the cheese, famed for smelling of stinky old fusty shoes, after their earlier work found that the mosquitoes preferred to bite people’s feet.
Physics - Won by a team who studied ‘fragmentation in rods by cascading cracks’, which can account for why bending dry spaghetti always causes it to break into more than just two pieces.

Learn more about the Ig Nobel Awards at The Annals of Improbable Research: improb.com/ig