A penguin minding its nest, and surrounded by the streaky evidence of its poop-shooting (Image: Benno Meyer-Rochow)

How far penguins can poop and whether people can swim faster in syrup than water were among the sticky questions answered by winners of the 2005 Ig Nobel prizes.

The spoof awards, organised by the science humour journal, the Annals of Improbable Research, honour scientific achievements that “make people laugh – then think”. They were presented at Harvard University’s otherwise distinguished Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, on Thursday.

Edward Cussler and Brian Gettelfinger, at the University of Minnesota, US, received the Chemistry Ig Nobel for resolving whether people can swim faster in syrup than water. The question arose as Gettelfinger, a student, wondered how to increase his speed as he trained for Olympic swimming trials.


So the pair set up an experiment in two 25-yard swimming pools on campus – requiring 22 separate levels of approval. They were offered 20 train cars’ worth of corn syrup to mix with water, but the city of Minneapolis ended that plan by demanding $20,000 since draining the syrup would overload the sewage system.

Instead, they stirred 310 kilograms of guar gum powder into one pool. “It wasn’t pretty when we came in the next morning,” Cussler told New Scientist. “It looked like diluted snot.”

But that did not stop 16 volunteer swimmers. All swam two lengths in each pool, showering as they went from the syrupy pool to clean water. Timing the swimmers, Cussler found that the thicker liquid increased the power of their strokes as much as it increased the drag on their bodies, so it made no difference. “It was fun,” he says, but in the end it was “totally useless”.

Poopal velocity

An Ig Nobel for fluid dynamics was awarded for a theoretical analysis of penguin poop propulsion, conducted by Benno Meyer-Rochow of the International University of Bremen in Germany and Oulu University in Finland, and Jozsef Gal of Lorand Eötvös University in Hungary.

When nature calls, brooding chinstrap and Adélie penguins are reluctant to leave their nests and expose their eggs to the cold. Instead, they simply point their rear outward, lift their tail, and fire. The departing excreta typically reaches distances of about 40 centimetres.

Accounting for the bird’s height, anal anatomy, and poopal velocity and viscosity, the researchers calculated that the internal pressures reach 10 to 60 kilopascals (0.1 to 0.6 atmospheres), well above the highest pressures humans can put to the task.

But is this not a rather trivial matter for serious scientists? “Actually, only a few people felt this,” Meyer-Rochow told New Scientist. “And when we explained the responses from zookeepers, palaeontologists, engineers, human physiologists and so on, everybody understood that examining the physical properties of the release of fluids through small orifices was something of general importance.”

Other prizes included:

 Literature – This celebrated the bold visions of the New Age story-tellers of Nigeria – purveyors of the so-called 419 email scam. Their vivid tales promise handsome rewards for assistance in recovering a great treasure that is rightfully theirs – or one that they stole fair and square.

 Economics – Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was lauded for her contribution to workplace productivity. She invented Clocky, a padded alarm clock that runs away on a pair of wheels and hides when its snooze alarm is pressed. By actually getting people out of bed, Clocky should add many productive hours to the workday – at least theoretically – the Ig Nobel committee says.

 Physics – This honours movement at a much slower pace – the “pitch drop” experiment which the late Thomas Parnell began at the University of Queensland in 1927, and which John Mainstone now continues. Pitch is a thick black tar which in theory is liquid, but seems to behave like a solid. To show it was a liquid, Parnell melted some into a funnel, where it cooled. Then he waited, and waited, and waited. The first drop took 8 years to fall, and the second took another nine. The eighth drop fell in 2000, and Mainstone is now waiting for the ninth.