Good news for
your Viagra-using hamster: On his next trip to Europe he'll
bounce back from jet lag faster than his unmedicated
friends.
The researchers
who revealed that bizarre fact earned one of 10 "Ig
Nobel" prizes awarded Thursday night for quirky, funny, and
sometimes legitimate scientific achievements, from the
mathematics of wrinkled sheets to U.S. military
efforts to make a ''gay bomb.''
The recipients of
the annual award handed out by the Annals of Improbable
Research magazine were honored at Harvard
University's Sanders Theatre.
A team at Quilmes
National University in Buenos Aires, Argentina, came up
with the jet-lag study, which found that hamsters given the
anti-impotence drug needed 50% less time to recover from a
six-hour time zone change. They didn't fly rodents to
Paris, incidentally -- they just turned the lights off
and on at different times.
Odd as it might
be, that research might have implications for millions of
humans. The same cannot be said for another winning report,
''Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects,'' published
in the British Medical Journal last year.
It was the
world's first comprehensive study of sword swallowing
injuries, said coauthor Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tenn., one of
only a few dozen active sword swallowers in the world.
Not surprisingly, throat abrasions, perforated
esophagi, and punctured blood vessels were the most
common injuries.
''Most sword
swallowing injuries happen either after another smaller
injury when the throat is tender and swollen, or while doing
something out of the ordinary, like swallowing
multiple swords,'' said Meyer, who went a month
without solid food after doing the latter in 2005.
The Ig Nobel for
nutrition went to a concept that sounds like a
restaurant marketing ploy: a bottomless bowl of soup.
Cornell
University professor Brian Wansink used bowls rigged with
tubes that slowly and imperceptibly refilled them with
creamy tomato soup to see if test subjects ate more
than they would with a regular bowl.
''We found that
people eating from the refillable soup bowls ended up
eating 73% more soup, but they never rated themselves as any
more full,'' said Wansink, a professor of consumer
behavior and applied economics. ''They thought 'How
can I be full when the bowl has so much left in it?'
''
His conclusion:
''We as Americans judge satiety with our eyes, not with
our stomachs.''
Harvard professor
of applied mathematics L. Mahadevan and professor
Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago in
Chile won for their studies on a problem that has
vexed anyone who ever made up a bed: wrinkled sheets.
The wrinkle patterns seen on sheets are replicated in
nature on human and animal skin, in science and in
technology.
''We showed that
you can understand all of them using a very simple
formula,'' Mahadevan said.
His research, he
says, shows that ''there's no reason good science can't
be fun.''
Other winners
include a Dutch researcher who conducted a census of all
the creepy-crawlies that share our beds, and a man who
patented a Batman-like device that drops a net over
bank robbers.
This year's
planned Ig Nobel program included a two-minute speech by
keynote speaker Doug Zongker consisting only of the word
''chicken,'' and a mini-opera entitled ''Chicken
Versus Egg,'' performed by professional
mother-daughter opera singers Gail Kilkelly and Maggie
McNeil.
Most winners are
more than happy to accept their awards from real Nobel
Laureates at the typically rowdy ceremony, including seven
of the 10 winners this year. But there are still a few
sticks-in-the-mud, magazine editor Marc Abrahams said.
The U.S. Air
Force won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize this year for its
proposal to develop a ''gay bomb'' -- a chemical weapon that
would make enemy soldiers want to make love with each
other, not war with the enemy.
Abrahams talked
to a number of retired and active Air Force personnel to
try and get someone to accept the prize in person on behalf
of the military. None would.
''Who in their
right mind would turn something like this down?'' Wansink
said. (Mark Pratt, AP)