“I have always hoped to win a real Nobel prize for medicine,” Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine told New Scientist. Nevertheless, he settled for the Ig Nobel prize in medicine instead, handed out along with nine other Ig Nobel prizes in a Thursday evening ceremony at Harvard University in Massachusetts, US.

It might be some consolation to note that a real Nobel prize winner was pushing a broom on stage to sweep away the paper airplanes traditionally thrown by the audience. The Annals of Improbable Research, which produces the Ig Nobel ceremony, points out that the 10 years that Harvard physicist Roy Glauber has spent sweeping the stage did not affect his selection as a physics laureate in 2005.

Fesmire, a specialist in emergency medicine and cardiology, probably did not have a real Nobel in mind when he published “Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage” in Annals of Emergency Medicine (vol 17, p 872). He was, it transpires, attempting to help a man who walked into the emergency room after hiccuping for 72 hours at up to 30 times a minute.

Heart stopper

Runaway electrical impulses in the vagus nerve cause intractable hiccups, so Fesmire attempted to block them by stimulating the nerve. Gagging, tongue pulling, sinus massage and pressing the eyeball to stimulate the vagus all failed to stop the hiccups. Then he remembered reading about a case in which digital rectal massage – inserting a finger into a patient’s anus – had slowed a racing heartbeat, an effect similar to runaway hiccups.


“It worked, and the rest is history,” he says. He has not needed to go that far again for other patients, but Majed Odeh of Bnai Zion Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, did a few years later and wrote a paper with the same title that earned him a share of the Ig Nobel.

However, Fesmire will not be trying it again. In researching his Ig Nobel acceptance speech, he told New Scientist that he found a treatment sure to be more popular with hiccup patients. “An orgasm results in incredible stimulation of the vagus nerve. From now on, I will be recommending sex – culminating with orgasm – as the cure-all for intractable hiccups.”

Eye-popping bird brain

Not any bird brain can scoop an Ig Nobel prize, but studying bird brains earned the ornithology prize for the late Philip May at the University of California at Los Angeles and Ivan Schwab of the University of California at Davis, both in the US. May wondered why the pileated woodpecker did not get concussed while pounding its beak into trees up to 12,000 times a day.

He found the bird had evolved a thick skull of spongy bone which held its contents tightly in place, like foam packing material. The birds also evolved their own versions of seat belts. A millisecond before the bird’s beak hits the wood, the nictitating membrane over its eyes tightens to keep them from popping out on impact.

Schwab suggests woodpeckers may have evolved small brains to make them more impact resistant, but admits that birds with little brainpower may have been the ones most likely to try head-butting trees in the first place.

Screeeeeeeeeech

The acoustics prize honoured research into another of those timeless questions, why do fingernails screeching on a blackboard send chills down the spine of virtually everyone who hears the sound?

Volunteers rated the sound of a three-pronged garden rake on slate top of the annoyance scale, followed by metal on metal and Styrofoam rubbing against itself, says Randolph Blake, now at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, US.

His experiments showed the frequencies in the middle of the audio range were the ones that drove people up the wall. Blake says chimpanzee warning cries “are remarkably similar to fingernails on a chalkboard”. It is possible our reactions are instinctive, hearkening back to warning signals screeched by our pre-human ancestors when they spotted a sabre-tooth on the prowl, he suggests.

Blake shares the prize with former colleagues Lynn Halpern and James Hillenbrand.