• 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.

  • 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:

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  • Slime mold wins geeky prize ... again!

    Science / AAAS

    The left image shows slime mold growing out from an initial food source to colonize other food sources (white dots) arranged like a map of Tokyo rail stations. After 26 hours of growth, the mold resolved itself into a network of tubes that efficiently connected the food sources. The research won the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize for transportation planning.

    You just can't keep a good slime mold down. That's one of the lessons from tonight's Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.

    Here are a few more lessons: Fruit bats like oral sex. Swearing relieves pain. Roller-coaster rides can relieve asthma. Oil and water do mix sometimes. And the best way to figure out who gets a promotion just might be to pull names out of a hat.

    This was the 20th "first annual" ceremony to honor scientific achievements that make you laugh, and then make you think. This year's festivities at Harvard University - presented by the Annals of Improbable Research, a scientific humor magazine - were organized around a bacterial theme. Among the highlights: the world premiere of a mini-opera about the bacteria living on a woman's front tooth, an appearance by the "Google Viral and Bacterial Advertising Team," and a warning to the audience that the person in the next seat might be harboring bacteria (doesn't everyone?).

    There was the usual Ig Nobel silliness: An 8-year-old girl was on hand to cut off over-long speeches by yelling "Please stop! I'm bored!" Paper airplanes were available for throwing (but only on cue, of course). Actual Nobel laureates handed out the petri-dish awards (and made themselves available for a "Win-a-Date-With-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest").

    Nobel laureates

    Charles Krupa / AP

    Nobel laureates Roy Glauber (Physics, 2005), Sheldon Glashow (Physics, 1979) and James Muller (Peace, 1985) demonstrate how bra cups that can be converted to emergency gas masks during the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at Harvard. The bra-mask invention won one of the not-completely-serious scientific prizes in 2009.

    But there was also a serious side to go along with the silliness. The Ig Nobel economics prize went to AIG, Goldman Sachs and other fallen financial firms for "creating and promoting new ways to invest money" - ways that led to trillions of dollars in losses worldwide. Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and the event's master of ceremonies, told The Associated Press that he tried to invite the company's executives to the ceremony.

    "We made a few attempts, but soon realized it probably would not be possible," Abrahams said. "They never responded, not even with a 'no thank you.'"

    Most of the other Ig Nobel laureates came gladly - so gladly that they paid their own way. Several scientists flew in from Japan to pick up their "Transportation Planning Prize" for figuring out how to use slime mold to design mass-transit routes. The team placed tiny bits of food in a pattern that mirrored Tokyo's rail system, with the slime-mold amoeba in the center. The single-celled creature sent out a web of veins to connect with the food bits - and after 26 hours, the surviving veins linked all the bits in an amazingly efficient way.

    The same research team won an Ig Nobel two years earlier for using slime mold in a similar way to solve puzzles. "The slime mold is back!" team members sang during their acceptance speech.

    Ig Nobel Prize

    Charles Krupa / AP

    The 2010 Ig Nobel Prize plaque features a petri dish - perhaps in tribute to the prize-winners who used remote-controlled helicopters to collect whale snot in petri dishes.

    The research into fruit-bat oral sex, which won the Ig Nobel for biology, is another example of science that makes you smirk. The research, published in the journal PLoS ONE, led scientists in China to wonder whether the behavior provided an evolutionary advantage. But maybe bats do it just because it feels good.

    The Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the scientists who studied why swearing feels good. Richard Stephens, a lecturer in psychology at Britain's Keele University, was inspired to look into the subject when he hit his hand with a hammer and blurted out an expletive ... which seemed to ease the pain. He noticed that his wife went through a similar experience while giving birth to their daughter.

    In Stephens' experiment, subjects were asked to keep their hands in ice water for as long as they could stand it. The subjects who swore could take the pain for longer periods. "What we think is, when you swear you produce an emotional reaction in yourself, you arouse your nervous system and you set off the fight-or-flight response," Stephens told AP. "It gets the heart rate up, gets the adrenaline flowing."

    Is that just B.S.? Feel free to chime in with your comments below ... but please, keep it clean. This shouldn't be a painful experience.

    Here's the full list of this year's Ig Nobel laureates, with links to the award-winning research. And stay tuned for the real Nobel Prize announcements, which are due to roll out starting Monday.

    2010 Ig Nobel Prizes:

    Engineering Prize: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot using a remote-control helicopter.

    Reference: "A Novel Non-Invasive Tool for Disease Surveillance of Free-Ranging Whales and Its Relevance to Conservation Programs," Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, Agnes Rocha-Gosselin and Diane Gendron, Animal Conservation, vol. 13, no. 2, April 2010, pp. 217-25.

    Medicine Prize: Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.

    Reference: "Rollercoaster Asthma: When Positive Emotional Stress Interferes with Dyspnea Perception," Simon Rietveld and Ilja van Beest, Behaviour Research and Therapy, vol. 45, 2006, pp. 977-87.

    Transportation Planning Prize: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.

    Reference: "Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design," Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Dan P. Bebber, Mark D. Fricker, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi, Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Science, Vol. 327. no. 5964, January 22, 2010, pp. 439-42.

    Physics Prize: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.

    Reference: "Preventing Winter Falls: A Randomised Controlled Trial of a Novel Intervention," Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest, New Zealand Medical Journal. vol. 122, no, 1298, July 3, 2009, pp. 31-8.

    Peace Prize: Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.

    Reference: "Swearing as a Response to Pain," Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston, Neuroreport, vol. 20 , no. 12, 2009, pp. 1056-60.

    Public Health Prize: Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety Office, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, for determining by experiment that microbes cling to bearded scientists.

    Reference: "Microbiological Laboratory Hazard of Bearded Men," Manuel S. Barbeito, Charles T. Mathews, and Larry A. Taylor, Applied Microbiology, vol. 15, no. 4, July 1967, pp. 899–906.

    Economics Prize: The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money - ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.

    Chemistry Prize: Eric Adams of MIT, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University, Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii, and BP, for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix.

    Reference: "Review of Deep Oil Spill Modeling Activity Supported by the Deep Spill JIP and Offshore Operator's Committee. Final Report," Eric Adams and Scott Socolofsky, 2005.

    Management Prize: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.

    Reference: "The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study," Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp. 467-72.

    Biology Prize: Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats.

    Reference: "Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time," Min Tan, Gareth Jones, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, Shuyi Zhang and Libiao Zhang, PLoS ONE, vol. 4, no. 10, e759

    More about the Ig Nobels and other silly science:

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  • Silly science takes the prize

    Every year, the Ig Nobels honor the truly weird wonders of science ... like the emergency bra that converts into a pair of gas masks. Tonight you can watch the Ig Nobel ceremony live as it unfolds (or crumples up in laughter).

    The Ig Nobels are presented by the folks behind the Annals of Improbable Research, a scientific humor magazine. Marc Abrahams, the annals' editor and tonight's master of ceremonies, likes to say that the awards recognize "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." Among my own favorite winners: the inventor of the flame-throwing car alarm ... the researchers who determined that empty beer bottles make better weapons in a bar brawl than full bottles ... and the scientist who wrote a research paper about homosexual necrophiliac duck rape.

    The 2010 Ig Nobels are being announced at 7:30 p.m. ET at Harvard University's Sanders Theater, and will be webcast live via Improbable Research's YouTube channel. Check it out, and come back to Cosmic Log for a full list of the winners.

    In the meantime, here are some more Web links worth of a prize, either serious or silly: