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STINKY FEET, ANNOYING NOISE TOP IGNOBEL PRIZE LIST
By Maggie Fox
Reuters
October 5, 2006
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyid=2006
-10-06T015157Z_01_N05250561_RTRUKOC_0_US-SCIENCE-IGNOBELS.xml
WASHINGTON - Research into stinky feet, a study on the sound of
fingernails
on a blackboard and a device that repels teen-agers with an
annoying
high-pitched hum on Thursday won IgNobel prizes <http://www.ignobel.com/>
--
the humorous counterpart to this week's Nobel prizes.
Other winning research included a U.S. and Israeli team's
discovery that
hiccups could be cured with a finger up the rectum and a study
into why
woodpeckers do not get headaches.
"The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the
imaginative --
and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology,"
said Marc
Abrahams, editor of the science humor magazine "Annals of
Improbable
Research," which sponsors the awards with the Harvard-Radcliffe
Science
Fiction Association and Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics
Students.
All the research is real and has been published in
often-prestigious
scientific and medical journals. However, unlike the Nobel
prizes awarded
this week by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, IgNobel winners
receive no
money, little recognition and have virtually no hope of
transforming science
or medicine.
Even the name of the award, a play on the word "ignoble," is
meant to be
deprecating.
But they receive their awards from real Nobel winners in an
event broadcast
on the Internet at <http://www.improbable.com> on Thursday
evening.
Some of the 2006 IgNobel winners:
-- BIOLOGY - Bart Knols of Wageningen Agricultural University in
the
Netherlands, the National Institute for Medical Research in
Tanzania and the
International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria and
colleague Ruurd de
Jong for showing that the female Anopheles gambiae mosquito,
which carries
malaria, is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese
and to the
smell of human feet.
"We have shown that three different Anopheles mosquito species
prefer to
bite different parts of a naked motionless volunteer and that
this behavior
is influenced by odors from those body regions," they wrote in
their report,
published in the Lancet medical journal in 1996.
-- ORNITHOLOGY - Ivan Schwab of the University of California
Davis, and the
late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los
Angeles, for
explaining why woodpeckers do not get headaches.
-- NUTRITION - Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten
Al-Mussalam of
the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung
beetles are
finicky eaters.
-- PEACE - Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for
inventing a
teen-ager repellent -- a device that makes a high-pitched noise
that is
annoying to teen-agers but inaudible to most adults; and for
later using the
technology to make cellphone ringtones that teenagers can hear
but not their
teachers.
-- ACOUSTICS - D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James
Hillenbrand of
Chicago's Northwestern University for a 1986 experiment aimed at
discovering
why the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard is so
irritating.
-- MEDICINE - Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee
College of
Medicine and the team of Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan and Arie
Oliven of Bnai
Zion Medical Center in Haifa, Israel who both published studies
entitled
"Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal
Massage."
-- MATHEMATICS - Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian
Commonwealth
Scientific and Research Organization, for calculating the number
of shots a
photographer must take to almost ensure that nobody in a group
photo will
have their eyes closed.
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Published by David Sunfellow
NewHeavenNewEarth (NHNE)
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