This evening, Annie Mole and I went over to the Sherfield Building on the Imperial College campus for the Ig Nobel Awards Tour Show, hosted by Marc Abrahams, organiser of the Ig Nobel prizes and author of the bi-montly ‘Annals of Improbable Research‘.
The Ig Nobel awards are given to scientists who publish research which, in the words of Abrahams, make people ‘laugh, and then think’. Winners from 2010 included the recipients of the Engineering Prize, scientists from London and Mexico who jointly developed a new method of collecting ‘whale snot’ using a remote-controlled helicopter to retrieve samples, a group of scientists from New Zealand who won the Physics Prize for demonstrating that wearing socks over your footwear improves your traction on icy footpaths, and the winners of the Peace Prize, a group of researchers from Keele University that identified that swearing relieves the pain response (when hitting your thumb with a hammer for example).
A few of the recipients of the 2010 prize made an appearance at tonight’s show, including Gareth Jones who gave a fascinating talk on a paper written by him and a group of Chinese scientists entitled ‘Fellatio By Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time’ (enough said!), and Dan Bebber, one of the members of a group of English and Japanese scientists who showed that the growth of slime molds could be used to model optimal routes for road and rail transport systems in their paper, ‘Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design’. Their informative speeches were completely overshadowed however by the enigmatic figure of Russian scientist Elena Bodnar and her ‘emergency bra‘, a fetching red number which quickly converts into a pair of gas masks, and which was ably demonstrated by several members of the audience tonight!
Closing on a slightly different theme, Marc Abrahams revealed that their organisation is also involved in the publicising of some newly discovered poems by William McGonnagal (the author of ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster‘ amongst other execrable pieces of poetry from the late 19th century). You should be able to read these works over the next few days here.
March 17, 2011
Events