Silly Science

We Americans are an odd lot. We loudly complain about our government leaders, second guess our coaches and managers, curse contractors and mechanics, loath banks and lenders. Even though we all came from somewhere else, we tell the rest of the world to “get off our lawn.”

You would think we were an unfriendly bunch.

Yet we bestow honors and awards on thousands of people at the drop of a hat. Who among us hasn’t received a plaque, a trophy, a cup, a ribbon?

Every town and city in the land is awash in beauty contests, spelling bees and athletic honors.

That’s ground level stuff. On the big stage, television this year overwhelmed us with the Eclipse Awards, the People’s Choice Awards, Critics Choice Awards, the Golden Globes, the Oscars, the Grammies and the Tonys. 

Then there are the NAACP Image Awards, the Hispanic Heritage Awards, the Movieguide Faith & Values Awards, the Kids’ Choice Awards, the Teen Choice Awards, the Do Something! Awards and the Guys’ Choice Awards.

Lesser known but just as noteworthy are the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, the Foot in Mouth Awards and the Rotten Sneakers Award.

A person could become wealthy leasing out red carpets.

Still, there is one awards presentation that draws our rapt attention. That would be the Ig Noble Prizes, staged annually at Harvard University by the editors of a not-to-be-taken-too-seriously group known as the Annals of Improbable Research.

They are awarded for "research that makes people laugh, and then think" and are often presented by actual Nobel laureates.

Past winners include a team from UC Davis for exploring why woodpeckers don't get headaches; researchers who calculated the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed; a study that determined that lap dancers get higher tips when they are ovulating; and a woman from MIT who invented an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people do get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.

The awards know no bounds. The prize for mathematics was once awarded to the Southern Baptist Church of Alabama for their county-by-county estimate of how many Alabama citizens will go to hell if they don't repent.

This year's honorees carried on the lofty traditions established by past winners.

Physics Prize: To Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that's on the floor.

Neuroscience Prize: To Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.

Psychology Prize: To Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, for amassing evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative, and more psychopathic than people who habitually arise early in the morning. 

Public Health Prize: To Jaroslav Flegr, Jan Havlíček and Jitka Hanušova-Lindova, and to David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan, Lisa Seyfried, for investigating whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat.

Art Prize: To Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea, for measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather than a pretty painting, while being shot [in the hand] by a powerful laser beam.

Economics Prize. To the Italian government's National Institute of Statistics, for proudly taking the lead in fulfilling the European Union mandate for each country to increase the official size of its national economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling, and all other unlawful financial transactions between willing participants.

Medicine Prize: To Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, for treating "uncontrollable" nosebleeds, using the method of nasal-packing-with-strips-of-cured-pork.

Nutrition Prize: To Raquel Rubio, Anna Jofré, Belén Martín, Teresa Aymerich, and Margarita Garriga, for their study titled “Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated From Infant Feces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages.”

This is truly news we can use. For example, I concluded that I would go insane if I owned a cat, that there is no end to the wonders of bacon, and that the next time I’m in Spain, I’ll pass on the fermented sausages.

Since we failed to report on last year’s festivities, the highlights included a study that confirmed by experiment that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive; a team that concluded some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond if those people and that pond were on the moon; and a discovery that the biochemical process by which onions make people cry is even more complicated than scientists previously realized.

A special Peace Prize was awarded to Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public and to the Belarus State Police for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.

Ain’t science grand?

Robert Rector is a veteran of 50 years in print journalism. He has worked at the San Francisco Examiner, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Valley News, Los Angeles Times and Pasadena Star-News. He can be reached at Nulede@Aol.Com.