• 2012's Maya non-apocalypse takes the grand prize for weird science

    Jean-Philippe Arles / Reuters

    Residents dressed as extraterrestrials with green-painted faces walk the streets of Bugarach, France, which was touted as a safe haven from the end of the world on Dec. 21, 2012.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    The hype over last month's supposed Maya doomsday has won honors as the weirdest science story of the past year — and although there wasn't all that much science to the claim that the ancient culture's calendar foretold the end of the world, the whole episode was a classic example of people putting too much faith in way-out calculations.

    "A year before that, we gave one of our prizes to a whole bunch of people who made specific prediction about when the world would end," said Marc Abrahams, who heads up the Ig Nobel Prize program for silly science. The big lesson? "When you make mathematical calculations, you should check your assumptions," Abrahams told me.

    Abrahams and I sifted through the scientific silliness of the past year, including the Maya non-apocalypse, tonight on "Virtually Speaking Science," an hourlong talk show on BlogTalkRadio online and in the Second Life virtual world. If you missed the live webcast, don't worry: You can catch up with the podcast by checking out the archive on BlogTalkRadio and iTunes.

    How did the hubbub surrounding the Maya calendar get started? It began decades ago with the suggestion that the ancient Maya may have seen the end of their 5,125-year-long cycle of creation as the opening for a cosmic Armageddon. Although archaeologists have shot down that hypothesis, the idea persisted — and got mixed up with other end-of-the-world ideas.

    Abrahams suspects that the idea got a push from folks who could profit from a little doomsday buzz: "Some people made money on it — especially people who wrote books about it or made TV shows about it. The prediction certainly did have monetary value for a few people."

    The Internet served a dual role in all this: The bad thing about the Internet is that it's easy for someone to make a way-out claim in some dark corner of the Web — whether we're talking about ancient calendars or alien-looking space blobs. The good thing is that there are lots of knowledgeable sources willing to do a reality check on remarkable claims. That applies not only to doomsday myths, but also to more strictly scientific issues such as the potential for arsenic-based life or the existence of extraterrestrial microbes.

    "When some piece of news gets out there about scientific discoveries, almost always that's the start of some long messy conversation between lots and lots of people," Abrahams observed. "They're almost immediately looking things up and arguing about something they actually saw, rather than something they heard tenth-hand. That's something new for the world. There's a lot of nonsense that gets shot down a lot earlier than it did before."

    Some of the other stories that made the top-10 list for the 2013 Weird Science Awards may sound almost nonsensical — but for the most part, they're way more substantive. That's the key indicator for the kind of scientific silliness that Abrahams is interested in for the Ig Nobels: "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." Take a look at the list, then tune in "Virtually Speaking Science" for a few laughs — and maybe a few deep thoughts as well:

    2013 Weirdie winners:

    Still more weird science:

    More podcasts from 'Virtually Speaking Science':

    "Virtually Speaking Science" is hosted in Second Life by the Exploratorium. Theoretical physicists Sean Carroll and Matt Strassler will be my guests on Feb. 6 for a show about the frontiers of physics.

     Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Science can be improbably practical

    Marc Abrahams, founder of the Ig Nobel Prizes and author of "This Is Improbable," talks about his approach to science. For more information, check out http://www.improbable.com/

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    As the impresario behind the Ig Nobel Prizes, Marc Abrahams is skilled at sniffing out what seems to be silly science — but often, there's a practical point behind the seeming silliness.

    Take Elena Bodnar's bra, for example. No, really. Take it. The bra that Bodnar invented can be converted into two filter masks in the event of a Chernobyl-style radiation leak or other emergency. That combination of laughability and practicality is what earned the Ukrainian physician an Ig Nobel Prize for Public Health in 2009.

    Abrahams recounts Bodnar's achievement and many other Ig-worthy innovations in a newly published book, "This Is Improbable," and he'll be adding to the store on Thursday night during the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at Harvard University. The webcast gets under way at 7:15 p.m. ET. There'll be paper airplanes flying, Nobel laureates officiating, and opera singers premiering a work titled "The Intelligent Designer and the Universe."

    You can expect this year's prizes to highlight improbable but not totally impractical scientific findings such as these nuggets from "This Is Improbable":

    • Which ear is better for detecting when someone is telling a lie? If you can only afford to listen with one ear, make it the left one. A 1993 study published in the journal Neuropsychologia found that people did marginally better at discerning truth and lies when they heard it with the left ear only, as opposed to the right ear only. "It works, to the extent it works, only when a man does the lying," Abrahams writes. 

    • How can you keep your stamina up when singing at a karaoke bar? A 2003 study published in the Journal of Voice found that karaoke singers who kept themselves hydrated and took one-minute breaks between songs were able to keep singing for more than 100 minutes, as opposed to the 85-minute average for those who weren't allowed to have rest or rehydration. However, the scientists found that there was no difference in the quality of the singing.

    • What's the best way to choose up sides for a basketball team? If team captains take alternate turns, the captain who chooses first gets an unfair advantage. It's fairer to go with an ABBABAAB pattern: Captain A makes choice No. 1, Captain B chooses No. 2 and 3, A chooses 4, B chooses 5, A chooses 6 and 7, B chooses 8. The same rule applies to pouring cups of coffee from a coffeepot, by the way. The research was published by the journal Complex Systems in 2003.

    • Which restroom stall should I choose? This is one of the great unresolved questions of sanitation science, along with the perennial controversy over toilet-paper orientation. One study suggested that in a four-stall restroom, the stalls on the end are most used. A different study saw indications that there was more action in the middle stalls. "The traces of these intellectual expeditions, deposited over many years in layers upon the ground, form a sort of mental compost," Abrahams writes. "It sits, ripening, for future scholars to uncover."

    Abrahams chuckled when I brought up the restroom-stall research during a telephone chat this week. "I think back to that study, and it really doesn't matter," he said. "There are lots of decisions in life you're asked to make every day where it doesn't matter. No matter what stall you choose, there's paper in all of 'em."

    But in some cases, even Abrahams derives practical benefit from the strange studies that wind up on the Ig Nobel list. For example, Stanford University philosopher John Perry won the Literature Prize last year for his theory of structured procrastination. Simply put, if you're avoiding the No. 1 task on your to-do list, do task No. 2, 3 or 4 instead. It's even better if the unpleasant task on the top of your list is something you don't really need to do after all.

    "When I read that, it really did change things for me," Abrahams said. "I adopted that as one of my personal guides every day. All day long, I'm cheating myself, happily."

    The lesson is that seemingly silly science can change your life. That came through loud and clear in last week's Golden Goose Awards, which honored the folks behind the development of lasers, glow-in-the-dark proteins and coral-inspired bone grafts. All three of those innovations sprang from research projects that were at one time or another written off as frivolous or useless. Who knows? Maybe the same story will be told about Thursday night's Ig Nobel Prize winners.

    "When anybody looks at any of these people and what they've done, however stunning the story is that you're seeing, that really is just the start of a much better and longer story," Abrahams said. "Unless that person got killed while doing it."

    More seemingly silly science:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • The secret formula for silly science

    Improbable.com

    The Ig Nobel Prizes sometimes knock scientific decorum off its pedestal.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    Updated 10:25 p.m. ET

    If there's a formula for silly science, Ig Nobel founder Marc Abrahams surely has it figured out. For 21 years, he and his friends at the Annals of Improbable Research have made international headlines by honoring breakthroughs like the first study of homosexual necrophiliac ducks, and the invention of the bra that turns into a gas mask.

    But here's a clue or two for future laureates: Make sure there's a dash of seriousness to go with the silliness. One sure way not to win an Ig Nobel is to try too hard to be funny.

    "If you were to set out and try to win an Ig Nobel Prize, you would almost certainly fail," Abrahams told me. "To win a prize, you've got to do something that makes pretty much everyone laugh when they first hear about it, and then it gets into their mind enough that they just want to keep thinking about it and finding out more. It's not that hard to make something funny, and it's not that hard to come up with something that will make people scratch their head and wonder about it. But it's very hard to come up with things that will do both of those."

    Abrahams talked about the ingredients of Ig-worthy science tonight during "Virtually Speaking Science," our monthly talk show on the Web and in the Second Life virtual world. If you missed the live show, you can still catch up with the podcast on BlogTalkRadio as well as on iTunes.

    The subject of tonight's show was particularly apt because today we announced the winners of this year's Weird Science Awards. The Weirdies celebrate the silliest science of the past year, from A (for Aflockalypse) to Z (for zombie ants).

    The Ig Nobels, which take their inspiration from the Nobel Prize, are a much bigger production. They're announced each September (or sometimes early October) during a Harvard ceremony that features real Nobel laureates, musical interludes and occasional barrages of paper airplanes. For the past two decades, it's been a formula for success for Abrahams and his fellow AIR-heads. After the Ig Nobel festivities, Abrahams takes the show on the road, to Britain, the Netherlands and other locations around the globe. Abrahams has also written several books that recount the tales behind the Ig Nobel winners.

    I discussed the Ig phenomenon with Abrahams during a phone interview on Tuesday. Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A:

    Cosmic Log: Are there particularly better or worse years for the Ig Nobels? Where does this past year rate?

    Marc Abrahams: One of the main qualities that everything has to have if we're doing a good job is that it's surprising. If each of the winners is not surprising, we have not been doing a good job. So I think the idea of surprise is like the idea of infinity. It's hard to compare infinities. It's hard to compare surprises. As long as everything is surprising, we're happy. And for all the winners we had, we saw plenty of people who were very, very surprised.

    Q: So whether it's infinity, or infinity times two, it's hard to compare. It almost sounds like you're saying "I can't decide which of my children I like best."

    A: Well, you probably can. But if you were to be asked on consecutive days, the answers would not be very consistent, probably.

    Q: Have you seen any areas that are really ripe for being recognized with an Ig Nobel? Any subject that is just crying out for the Ig Nobel treatment?

    A: There are so many ... I can't think of a particular subject that stands out over the others as having not been recognized. It's more that there are certain things that people do that seem to keep on producing this quality of work. We've seen no signs that anything is slowing down. Humanity seems to be getting better and better at producing this stuff. Or maybe just at making it apparent to the rest of the world so that we can find it.

    Anything that's so complicated that people will probably never really understand it is going to produce some good Ig Nobel prizes, because people are going to try their hardest to understand it, or pretend to understand it. I'll mention medicine, because medicine is far too complicated, and most doctors who know what they're doing seem to spend most of their time realizing that they barely know anything at all. But there are other doctors who don't seem to feel that way. Those are the ones who tend to win more Ig Nobel Prizes.

    Q: Are there some researchers who go out and deliberately try to win a prize?

    A: Oh, yeah. From the beginning we've had far more people than we would have ever expected who seem to devote their lives to trying to get an Ig Nobel Prize. There are some who are constantly sending in all sorts of things. They're welcome to nominate themselves. Anybody can. But we get thousands and thousands of nominations every year. Ten to 20 percent of those are people nominating themselves. They almost never win. And of the very few people who have nominated themselves and won, in almost every case, they did not set out to win an Ig Nobel Prize. They may have set out to win a Nobel Prize, but the way it came out was just a side effect. They had something they were trying to get done, and somewhere along the way, or after it was all finished, it became apparent that, wow, this is Ig Nobel-class work.

    Q: Have some researchers' lives been changed because they won an Ig Nobel? For example, the woman who invented the bra that converts into a pair of gas masks?

    A: Yeah, that's a good example. Especially in the last five or 10 years, there seem to be a fair number of people who have had pretty good things happen to them. They've started businesses, or their businesses have taken off. They've gotten book contracts or have become better known. Elena Bodnar is a good example. Kees Moeliker, the homosexual-necrophiliac-duck guy. Even Andre Geim, who used magnets to levitate a frog and win an Ig, and then 10 years later got a Nobel Prize ... the Ig Nobel had nothing to do with him getting a Nobel Prize, but Andre being Andre, the same kinds of forces were at work in him that led to both those things.

    I've seen Andre say several times in interviews that it took a lot more courage for him and his colleague Michael Berry to accept their Ig Nobel Prize than the Nobel Prize. They've both been well-known and respected scientists for a long time, and sometimes there's been a little bit of a stigma against scientists getting up in public and appearing to be fully human and enjoying life. If you look back at the last century or so, it's hard to come up quickly with more than two or three names of scientists who enjoyed being funny in public. Richard Feynman is about the only one.

    Q: During September's Ig Nobel ceremony, the mathematics prize went to preacher Harold Camping and other doomsayers who predicted the end of the world, erroneously. Is there room for a prize to recognize the 2012 Maya apocalypse this year?

    A: It's certainly possible. We have a policy of not discussing candidates for future prizes in public. But I'm comfortable in saying that pretty much anything you can think of could be a candidate, if someone were to make a nomination. With those predictions, the problem is, who do you nominate? We're hesitant to give a prize in a case where it's not at all clear who we're giving it to. We don't award the prize to a concept. We award it to a specific person or a specific group of people.

    Q: I'm greatly tempted to ask you to list some of your favorite prizes from the past...

    A: I don't have any one that is the absolute favorite. There's the levitating frog with magnets, there's the homosexual necrophiliac duck, Elena Bodner's emergency bra ... boy, where to stop? Jacques Benveniste won two Ig Nobel Prizes: one for explaining that water molecules are able to remember things, and the second for extending that research and starting a company that was going to let the public send credit card information over the Internet or a phone line, in return for which this company would send you drugs over the Internet or the phone line. You would somehow take a glass of water and hook it up to your telephone, and they would deliver your medicine to you.

    Q: If you're talking about multiple winners, there's the Japanese slime-mold research group.

    A: Yup. And who knows? It's conceivable that any of the winners could win again in the future for things they haven't yet done.

    There's also the case of the prize that went to two teams of researchers who independently came up with studies saying that herring, those little fish, communicate by farting. One of the groups has an especially good story. It was research done in Sweden, in Stockholm harbor, at the request of the Swedish government. This was back when the Soviet Union still existed, and the Swedish government was convinced that the Soviets were sending submarines into the harbor, but they needed proof before they could get up in public and accuse them.

    So they put some microphones underwater, figuring that they would get recordings of the sounds of the submarines. They heard some mechanical clanking, very rhythmic. It sounded like metal banging, and they thought, "This is it! These are the submarines. But we're going to do this right, and we're going to get some good biologists to analyze this and tell us for sure what this is."

    So they got these guys, who pretty quickly realized that these were not Soviet submarines. These were herrings, farting. We occasionally do shows in Scandinavia, and if one of them comes to the show, they'll usually go to the market beforehand, buy a freshly cut herring, bring it to the show and demonstrate. "This is a herring, and I'm going to show you the sound it makes."

    I recently ran across a big report about the Swedish effort to detect submarines, and it was a wonderful report to read ... only it was missing this vital information. It didn't say anything at all about this, which in a way was one of the key elements in the whole history of the relationship between these two countries.

    That got me thinking about all the history that's taught in schools, and how it's always so dignified. You never get these things that are sometimes really right in the heart of what happened. Nobody talks about them because they're not dignified.

    Tonight's "Virtually Speaking Science" conversation took place in Second Life and will be archived on BlogTalkRadio and iTunes. Check out these other podcasts from the "VSScience" show:

    Many thanks to the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics for co-sponsoring Wednesday's Second Life talk at the MICA Small Auditorium at Stella Nova.

    Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

  • Silly science prizes highlight beer-loving bugs, pee pressure

    Researcher Peter Snyder explains the serious point behind his seemingly silly study of full bladders, pain and decision making. Snyder is among this year's Ig Nobel Prize winners.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    Beetles who boink beer bottles ... a car-crunching mayor ... and researchers who study the link between pee pressure and decision-making? These have got to be the silliest science laureates of the year. At least that's what the folks behind this year's Ig Nobel Prizes intended.

    Every year, the Ig Nobels recognize scientific achievements that make you laugh, and then make you think. The ceremony, organized at Harvard University by a science humor magazine called the Annals of Improbable Research, is timed to come just before the Nobel Prizes are announced, and around the time that the list is issued for the National Medals of Science and Technology.

    Most of the Ig Nobel laureates are real scientists, although there are always a few honorees who would probably just as soon not be so "honored." For example, this year's mathematics prize went to a procession of failed doomsday prophets — including Harold Camping, the preacher who stirred up such a fuss earlier this year over the Rapture that didn't come. They won the award "for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations."

    Last year marked a milestone for the Ig Nobels: Dutch-Russian physicist Andrei Geim, who received a funny physics prize in 2000 for his experiments in magnetic frog levitation, won a share of the honest-to-goodness Nobel Prize in physics for his work with graphene — thus becoming the first Ig recipient to win a Nobel as well.

    As is traditional for the Ig Nobels, real live Nobel laureates helped hand out the awards at Harvard, and one of them was appointed to sweep up the paper airplanes that were thrown during the ceremony. An 8-year-old girl stood by to chant, "Please stop, I'm bored," if any recipient went over the 60-second limit for acceptance speeches.

    Darryl Gwynne / UT-Mississauga

    A male Australian jewel beetle attempts to mate with a "stubby" beer bottle.

    Beer goggles for beetles
    This year's biology prize went to Australian researcher David Rentz and his colleague at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, Darryl Gwynne, for writing a research paper about Australian jewel beetles who become so enamored with "stubby" brown beer bottles that they try to mate with them. In fact, they try so vigorously that they can die in the hot sun during their repeated attempts. It turns out that the bottles have the texture and sparkly orange-brown color that male beetles associate with a "super female" beetle, Gwynne said.

    During tonight's ceremony, Gwynne joked that the research demonstrates that "only males make mistakes, not females." It also shows how humans and their trash can unwittingly interfere with evolution — which is the serious point behind the silliness. 

    Gwynne was a bit surprised to win an Ig Nobel for research published back in 1983. "I'm honored, I think," he said in a UT-Mississauga news release. "The awards make people think, and they're a bit of a laugh. Really, we've been sitting here by the phone for the past 20-plus years waiting for the call. Why did it take them so long?"

    Focusing on peace and pee
    The winner of this year's Ig Nobel Peace Prize is Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, capital of Lithuania. Zuokas made a splash by driving an armored personnel carrier over cars that violated the city's parking rules.

    "I just decided that it was time to teach bullies who had no respect for the rights of others a lesson that left an impression," he told The Associated Press in an email. Although the city currently uses more traditional methods to fight parking scofflaws — such as issuing tickets and towing vehicles — Zuokas says he keeps the tank on standby.

    Vilnius Mayor Arturas Zuokas won this year's Ig Nobel "Peace Prize" for running over illegally parked cars with a tank. This clip from Lithuania shows his diplomacy at work.

    The studies on pee pressure were conducted by two groups of researchers who found that the need to urinate affected decision-making by their experimental subjects. One group found that moderate stress seemed to focus attention on the tasks at hand, but the other group concluded that an extreme need to urinate reduced attention span and the ability to make decisions.

    "When people reach a point when they are in so much pain they just can't stand it anymore, it was like being drunk," Peter Snyder, a professor of neurology at Brown University, told AP. "The ability to hold information was really impaired."

    Actually, the point behind Snyder's study wasn't really to see how long people can hold it. He and his colleagues were focusing more generally on how pain affects decision making. It just turns out that keeping people from voiding their bladders was a "low-cost, low-risk" way to create pain that's easily relieved after a quick zip to the bathroom.

    Makes you think, doesn't it? Which of today's winners make you laugh? Which make you scratch your head  ... and wonder how they ever got paid for doing this? Feel free to weigh in with your Ig Nobel ratings in the comment section below.

    Here's the full list of 10 Ig Nobel laureates:

    Physiology prize: Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl and Ludwig Huber for determining that when a red-footed tortoise yawns, other tortoises don't yawn in response. Reference: "No Evidence Of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise Geochelone carbonaria."

    Chemistry prize: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm. Reference: US patent application 2010/0308995 A1. Filing date: Feb 5, 2009.

    Medicine prize: Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop. and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby and Paul Maruff for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things — but worse decisions about other kinds of things‚ when they have a strong urge to urinate.  References: "Inhibitory spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains" and "The Effect of Acute Increase in Urge to Void on Cognitive Function in Healthy Adults."

    Psychology prize: Karl Halvor Teigen for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh. Reference: "Is a Sigh 'Just a Sigh'? Sighs as Emotional Signals and Responses to a Difficult Task."

    Literature prize: John Perry for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important. Reference: "How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done," later republished elsewhere under the title "Structured Procrastination."

    Biology prize: Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle. References: "Beetles on the Bottle: Male Buprestids Mistake Stubbies for Females (Coleoptera)" (1983) and "Beetles on the Bottle" (1984).

    Physics prize: Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru and Herman Kingma, for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't. Reference: "Dizziness in Discus Throwers is Related to Motion Sickness Generated While Spinning."

    Mathematics prize: Dorothy Martin (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping (who predicted the world would end on Sept. 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on Oct. 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

    From May 24, 2011: California preacher Harold Camping, who said the world would end on May 21, now says the Rapture will happen in October. NBC's George Lewis reports.

    Peace prize: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank. Video: "Vilnius Mayor Fights Illegally Parked Cars With Tank."

    Public safety prize: John Senders for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him. Reference: "The Attentional Demand of Automobile Driving." Video: "Pioneer Days on Rt 128."

    Research on the "attentional demands of automobile driving," conducted on I-495 and Route 128 outside of Boston in the mid-1960s.

     More about silly science:

    Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.