- A study showing the link between country music and
suicide
has taken one of the top prizes in this year's Ig-Nobel awards - the
humorous
alternative to the Nobel prizes.
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- Other winners include the inventor of the karaoke
machine,
the man who patented the "comb-over" for covering the head of
bald men and a student who investigated the danger of eating food that
has fallen on the floor. The 10 winners of the 2004 Ig-Nobel prizes - which
celebrate the bizarre, weird, funny and improbable elements of genuine
scientific inquiry - received their awards last night at a ceremony at
Harvard University in Boston.
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- Marc Abrahams, who conceived the awards 14 years ago,
said that the "Igs" are given to studies or inventions judged
to have done most in making people laugh and then think. Mr Abrahams, who
publishes the Journal of Improbable Research, said the prizes honour the
"whipped cream of humanity", or those thinkers who are either
eccentrically brilliant or brilliantly eccentric.
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- The medicine prize was won by Steven Stack of Wayne State
University in Detroit, Michigan, and James Gundlach of Auburn University
in Alabama, who published an investigation into the effect of country music
on suicide. The study found that country music, with its emphasis on
marital
discord, alcoholism and social alienation, can be linked with an increased
suicide rate.
-
- "The results of a multiple regression analysis of
49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country
music, the greater the white suicide rate," the two researchers
found.
-
- The physics prize went to Ramesh Balasubramaniam of
Ottawa
University in Canada and Michael Turvey of Connecticut University, who
carried out an exhaustive mathematical study of hula hooping. They worked
out how movements of the hip and lower limbs keep the hula hoop from
falling.
"These modes might stabilise the hoop's angular momentum by
controlling
respectively its vertical and horizontal components," they
said.
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- A Chicago high school student, Jillian Clarke, became
the youngest person to win an Ig-Nobel when she won the public health award
for investigating the "five-second rule" about whether it is
safe to eat food that has dropped on the floor. "We first surveyed
100 people to see if they were familiar with the five-second rule, and
if so, have they ever applied it and if they ever applied it what foods
would they feel comfortable eating after floor contact," she said.
Further work revealed what type of food - sticky or dry - and floor
coverings
- smooth or rough -were most likely to contaminate dropped food.
-
- The psychology prize went to Daniel Simons of Illinois
University and Christopher Chabris of Harvard, who demonstrated that when
people paid close attention to one thing they can be made to overlook
anything
going on nearby, including a man dressed in a gorilla suit.
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- 'WINNING' IDEAS
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- Miracle water
-
- The Coca-Cola company takes the chemistry prize for using
advanced technology to convert liquid from the river Thames into Dasani,
the "mineral" water that had to be withdrawn for precautionary
reasons
-
- Nudist library
-
- The American Nudist Research Library at Kissimmee in
Florida wins the literature prize for preserving a cheeky slice of history
so that everyone can enjoy seeing it
-
- Flatulent herrings
-
- The biology prize goes to a team including Robert Batty
of Dunstaffnage Marine Laboratory in Oban who demonstrated the ability
of herrings to communicate by releasing bubbles of gas from their
intestines
-
- Inventor of the Karaoke
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- Daisuke Inoue, of Hyogo in Japan, won the peace prize
for inventing the Karaoke sing-along machine which provides an entirely
new way for people to learn to tolerate each other
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- Baldness cure
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- Donald Smith and his late father, Frank, from Florida,
win the engineering prize for patenting the "comb-over", the
clever technique of covering a bald spot by pulling hair over it from the
side of the head, as practised by Bobby Charlton and Neil Kinnock
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reserved
-
- http://news.independent.co.uk/world
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