Yawning turtles, wasabi alarms and other 'Igs'

We can always count on science to make us think but sometimes, it makes us laugh before it makes us think. The latter kind is the kind of achievement, many in science, that the Ig Nobel Prizes award every year since 1991. This year’s awarding ceremony took place last Sept. 29 at Sanders Theater at Harvard University.

Let us begin with my most favorite awardees — the six individuals who have made doomsday predictions down to the specific year and even day. Obviously, the world has not yet ended, so these six doomsayers have now been distinguished by the Ig Nobel awards for “teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.” The Ig Nobel for Mathematics went to the following (date indicates the time they said the world would end): Dorothy Martin (1954), Pat Robertson (1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet (1990), Lee Jang Rim (1992), Credonia Mwerinde (1999), and Harold Camping (Sept. 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on Oct. 21, 2011). I think equal credit in the form of little “Igs” should also be given to those who believed them.

When the world did not end as predicted each time, there were probably pockets of sighs from those who made plans based on those endings. And because the world has not yet ended, the Ig Nobel for Psychology still went to the scientist Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo, Norway who tried to figure out why people sigh in his study called “Is a Sigh ‘Just a Sigh’? Sighs as Emotional Signals and Responses to a Difficult Task.” He concluded that people sigh as both an unintentional signal that something sucked and also a pause before they move on.        

Aside from “sighs,” “yawns” also did not escape the probing mind of scientists. Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl and Ludwig Huber wanted to see if yawns were as contagious in turtles as have been presumed for all vertebrates. For this, they did a study entitled “No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise” which earned them this year’s Ig for Physiology. I read the study which even had illustrations of the turtles being made to yawn in front of another turtle. It really made me laugh, then think about many things, including the things scientists do to make us think.

The Ig for Biology went to a study that was done in 1983 which caught the Ig’s Biology Prize only this year. In fact, it has been a running joke among scientists for years since the research came out. It was a breakthrough discovery published in no less than the Royal Entomological Society of London, involving a beetle that mates WITH (not AFTER a bottle of) a certain kind of Australian beer. I did not come across any information on how or why the Ig awardees Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz decided to study this but because of their focused dedication, we now know that the “Color and reflection of tubercles on the bottle glass are suggested as causes for attraction and release of sexual behavior.”

The Ig for Chemistry went to the Japanese scientists who finally thought of another way to make use of the stinging power of wasabi. I think it was just a matter of time. The prize went to Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of Japan, for determining how much wasabi in the air would be enough to be used in an alarm to “awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.” I saw their patent application which was complete with diagrams on how to release wasabi odor in our otherwise dull lives.

This year, I wrote a column entitled “To Pee or not to Pee” which was on the study done by Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop, Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff. They found out that people make somewhat better decisions when their bladders were full. That study earned them the Ig for Medicine this year.

And while we are mulling over new possibilities posed by recent physics that a particle that travels faster than light may have just been discovered, the Ig for Physics went to the scientists Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne and Bruno Ragaru, and Herman Kingma who worried about and studied “why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don’t.” Using video analysis, they concluded that hammer throwers are more able to use visual cues for their balance than discus throwers. The scientists also noticed the head movements in discus throwers were of the type that could induce motion sickness.

But I think the best Igs this year (by “best,” I mean the ones that made us REALLY laugh and then REALLY think”) went to the “un-science” awards for Literature and Peace. Literature went to John Perry of Stanford University for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which gives the advice that in order to achieve big significant things, you should work on big things to escape bigger, more significant things.

And the Ig for Peace? Hands down to Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, for giving a definitive end to the problem of illegal parking in his city by running over the parked cars with an armored tank. Yeah, nothing speaks like an armored tank as a showpiece for peace.

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