Ig Nobel Prizes Stranger Than Fiction

Ig Nobel Prizes Stranger Than Fiction

By Mary Beckman
ScienceNOW Daily News
5 October 2007

Ice cream may never be the same now that Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan has discovered how to extract vanillin, the essence of vanilla flavor, from cow dung. Don't pooh-pooh Yamamoto's accomplishment. It may not win her a Nobel Prize, but it has netted her an honor equally exclusive. At a ceremony at Harvard University last night, Yamamoto received the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry. A local ice cream shop even whipped up a special flavor in her honor--Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist--although the ice cream makers avoided scatological flavoring.

Yamamoto was one of 10 new laureates crowned in the 17th annual Ig Nobel ceremony, which was sponsored by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research. In all, dozens of scientists, five Nobel laureates, and a paper-airplane-throwing throng gathered to celebrate the gems of funny, odd, or questionable research found amid the serious stuff.

The medicine prize went to radiologist Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, U.K., and entertainer Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, for their work describing the side effects of sword swallowing, which include sore throats and gastrointestinal bleeding. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan of Harvard University and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of the University of Santiago in Chile were honored with the physics prize for their work uncovering how sheets wrinkle. Biology winner Johanna van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands described how bedbugs congregate in those sheets.

At the forefront of combat innovation, the Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, took the peace prize for its 1994 proposal to create a "gay bomb," a chemical weapon that would cause soldiers to make homosexual love, not war. (Air Force researchers were not available to say whether the converted soldiers would want to marry.) And speaking of love, Diego Golombek of the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, accepted the aviation prize for his group's discovery that Viagra can help jetlagged hamsters get their circadian rhythms back on schedule.

Juan Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon, and Núria Sebastián-Gallés of the Universitat de Barcelona in Spain bagged the linguistics prize for demonstrating that rats can't tell the difference between two languages--Dutch or Japanese--when they are spoken backward. The article 搕he� made an appearance in the literature prize. Winner Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, documented how problematic the can be when alphabetizing. The economics Ig Nobel went to inventor Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taichung, Taiwan, for U.S. patent #6,219,959, which proposes using a net to capture bank robbers.

Behavior researcher Brian Wansink of Cornell University took home the Ig Nobel in nutrition for his soup bowl that inconspicuously refills as a person slurps from it. He used the deceptive device to examine how people judge how much to eat in a study reported in the journal Obesity Research. Wansink, author of the book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think and a microcelebrity, took pride in winning the award: "If an article is good enough to be in a great journal and vivid enough to receive an Ig Nobel, that's incredible!"

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More about this year's Ig Nobels

比小说更荒诞的搞笑诺贝尔奖

译者注：处女秀，肯定好多错误，这个台湾人的名字XXX都没搞清楚。希望大家多多指导。谢谢。
冰淇淋从来没有像现在这样，日本国际医学中心的Mayu Yamamoto发现了一种从牛粪中提取香兰素的方法，香兰素是香草精的精华。不要嘲笑Yamamoto的成就。虽然这不能让她获得诺贝尔奖，但这仍给她赢得了一个独一无二的荣誉。昨晚在哈佛大学的颁奖晚会上，Yamamoto获得了2007年度搞笑诺贝尔奖化学奖。一个本地的冰淇淋店也为之推出了一款别味的“Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist”冰淇淋，当然冰淇淋制作者已经尽力避免粪便味。
Yamamoto是第17届搞笑诺贝尔奖的10个获奖者之一，此奖项由科学幽默杂志《不可能研究年报》赞助。总之，有几十个科学奖，五位诺贝尔奖获得者，以及一个纸飞机集群聚集到一起来庆祝这些在严肃的科学研究中发现的有趣奇特或可疑的研究。
医学奖授予了Brian Witcombe of Gloucester,U.K.的放射学者和Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee的表演者，以表彰他们在描述吞剑的副作用，包括喉咙疼痛和胃肠出血。哈佛大学的Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan和智利圣地亚哥大学的Enrique Cerda Villablanca被授予物理学奖，因为他们发现了床单是怎样褶皱的。生物学奖得主荷兰艾恩德霍芬科技大学的Johanna van Bronswijk则揭示了臭虫们是怎样聚集到我们的床单里的。
在战斗发明的前沿，位于俄亥俄州代顿的隶属空军的赖特实验室获得了本届的和平奖，他们在1994年提议制造一种“同性恋炸弹”，这种化学武器可以使士兵们沉迷于同性恋而不是战争。（空军的研究人员没有透露中弹的士兵们是否会结婚。）说到了爱情，阿根廷Universidad Nacional deQuilmes的Diego Golombek获得了飞行学奖，他的团队发现了伟哥可以帮助受高速飞行影响时差错乱的(jetlagged)仓鼠按进度回到它们的生理节奏。
西班牙巴塞罗那大学的Juan Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon 和 Núria Sebastián-Gallés则因为他们证实了在两种语言比如荷兰语和日语在被反方向发音时，老鼠不能区分出这两种语言。文章《The》则出现在了文学奖中，文学奖得主GlendaBrowne来自澳大利亚蓝山Blaxland市，他叙述了在按字母顺序排列时单词the是多么的不确定。搞笑诺贝尔经济学奖则授予了来自台湾Taichung的KuoCheng Hsieh，他提议使用一张网来逮捕银行抢劫者，这获得美国专利#6,219,959。
康乃尔大学 大学的行为学研究者Brain Wansink获得了搞笑诺贝尔营养学奖，因为他的汤碗可以在人喝汤时不引人注意地填满。他使用了一种欺骗性的设备来测试人们是怎样判断吃多少的，这项研究被发表在了《肥胖研究》杂志上。《盲目进食：为什么我们总是吃的比我们想吃的要多》的作者Wansink以及一个microcelebrity，获奖时非常自豪，“如果一篇文章可以发表在一个核心期刊上，并且同时又获得了搞笑诺贝尔奖，这是多么的不可思议啊！”
更多搞笑诺贝尔奖请浏览http://www.improb.com/
后记:得奖的可不是什么自娱自乐的民间科学家,有些都是大名鼎鼎的,论文也都是发表在一流学术杂志上的,包括Nature等.