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Nature
Published online: 06 October 2004; | doi:10.1038/431617b
Harvard ceremony graced by hula-hooping laureatesSteve NadisIg Nobel Prizes make audience laugh... and think.Boston - This
year's fourteenth Ig Nobel Prize ceremony clashed with the first debate
of the US presidential election campaign. But there was no evidence of
regret inside the packed auditorium at Harvard University,
Massachusetts. For these fans of science that "makes you laugh, and
then makes you think", it was George W. Bush and John Kerry who were
missing the show.
Presided
over by the King and Queen of Swedish Meatballs, as usual, the 30
September event featured Nobel laureates Dudley Herschbach, William
Lipscomb and Richard Roberts blowing bullhorns, hula-hooping and
singing the classic You're Just Too Good To Be True with a karaoke machine.
Herschbach
was the delectable prize on offer in the evening's contest to win a
date with a Nobel laureate, and Roberts was called on to describe the
concept of heredity in just seven words: "Heredity means blame your
parents, not yourself," he said.
The
Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Steven Stack of Wayne State
University in Detroit, Michigan, and James Gundlach of Auburn
University, Alabama, for their paper, "The effect of country music on
suicide" (Social Forces 71, 211–218; 1992). The physics prize
was awarded to Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottawa in
Ontario, Canada, and Michael Turvey of the University of Connecticut,
Storrs, for their sterling work on the dynamics of hula-hooping (Biol. Cybern.
90, 176–190; 2004) — it seems that to keep the plastic ring spinning
around the waist, it is vital to move up and down at the knees.
The
coveted public-health prize went to Jillian Clarke, a Chicago
high-school graduate, for experiments that validated the 'five-second
rule', which states that it is safe to eat food dropped on the floor if
its stay there was sufficiently brief. And the peace prize went to
Daisuke Inoue of Hyogo, Japan, the inventor of karaoke. "Let's party!"
he urged the crowd.
Daniel
Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and
Christopher Chabris of Harvard University brought home the psychology
prize for their report, "Gorillas in our midst", which showed that when
observers concentrate on one thing — in their study, people passing a
basketball back and forth — they can completely overlook something else
— such as a man appearing in a gorilla suit.
And
the biology prize went to a collaboration from Canada, Denmark,
Scotland and Sweden for demonstrating the role of flatulence in herring
communications. Accepting his award, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser
University, Canada, summed up the evening: "It's been a gas," he said.
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