Some Nobel prizes deserve a laugh
By BILL DUNCAN If you have not heard that President Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, you must be living under a rock. You are probably tired of hearing the pros and cons over the awarding of the prize, so I am not going to add to the debate. I am going to write about the Ig Nobel Prize that honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. These are real prizes intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative and to spur people’s interest in science, medicine and technology, What caught my eye this year was a small newspaper story about a pair of British researchers who won the Ig Nobel Veterinary Medicine Prize for their study on the affect of human behavior on animals. The British researchers, Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University in Newcastle, England have found that cows given names by their owners produce more milk than those anonymous cows in the herd. Honest folks, I don’t make this stuff up. Catherine couldn’t attend the awards ceremony last Saturday because she had recently given birth, but she sent a picture of herself and her infant daughter dressed in a cow suit. Rowlinson gave the synopsis of the research and said the farmers who named their livestock produced more milk a day than those unnamed cows. He said farmers also had to chat with the cows, groom them and generally show TLC to achieve better milk production. In the milk of human kindness, President Obama may have won that peace prize in Switzerland, but five scientists from the Bern University in Switzerland won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for determining it is better to be smashed over the head with a full beer bottle than an empty one. Their spokesman was Steffen Ross, a forensic pathologist, who summed up the research with this fact finding, that an empty beer bottle will deal more damage because an empty bottle will not splinter as easily as a full bottle making it a softer blow. Elena Bodnar of Chicago won the public health prize by developing a gas mask brassiere. Her presentation at the awards ceremony was a lighthearted look at science at a time of terrorism and street riots. Her gas mask bra requires only a slight modification of a normal bra to design it into a decent air filter that would be always available and easily shared as well as machine-washable. Speaking of health, Donald L. Unger of Thousand Oaks, Calif. took a 2009 award with his presentation that no matter what mother said, knuckle-cracking will not lead to arthritis of the fingers. Unger said he got that motherly warning and in pure spite cracked his left hand’s knuckles for 60 years, but never his right. He scientifically proved there was absolutely no difference. The final award is probably male inquisitiveness, but there was a woman. Katherine Whitcome, of Cincinnati, Ohio, involved in the research. The question was: Why pregnant women don’t tip over. “It took three of us to make the astute observation that pregnant women walk differently,” Whitcome, a human evoluntary biology professor, said. The team discovered that pregnant women change their center of gravity that is accommodated by a specially evolved lumbar curve. They also found similarly dimorphic morphologies in fossil vertebrae of Australopithecus, a bipedal hominid that predates the human species. On a need to know basis, all of this will somehow be important to mankind, who may find humor in the discoveries, but no lasting peace. (Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)
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