News in Science

Honouring the IgNobel

Australian lawyer John Keogh, of Melbourne, is one of the proud winners of this year's IgNobel Prizes.

The IgNobels are designed to honour people whose achievements, according to the organisers, "cannot or should not be reproduced". They celebrate the unusual, imaginative, and goofy elements of science, medicine, and technology.

Mr Keogh's achievement? In July this year he successfully patented the wheel, which earned him the IgNobel prize for Technology. The one catch is that he shares his award with the Australian Patent Office, which granted him patent #2001100012.

Mr Keogh had submitted his patent application, for a "circular transportation facilitation device", to highlight flaws in the Patent Office's new system, which he said was merely rubber-stamping.

The Igs, presented last Thursday at Harvard University, were first established in 1991 by humour magazine The Annals of Improbable Research, but have become a prestigious event in their own right. No less then four actual Nobel laureates were on hand to present this year's Igs.

Australians have traditionally fared well in the Igs. Last year, Jasmuheen, who claims to live on nothing but air, picked up the Literature prize, and in 1999, Len Fisher earned a Physics Ig for his calculations on optimal biscuit-dunking.

Other IgNobel winners this year were:

Medicine: Peter Barss of McGill University, for his report 'Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts', (The Journal of Trauma vol. 21, no. 11, 1984, pp. 990-1)

Physics: David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts, for his partial solution to the question of why shower curtains billow inwards.

Biology: Buck Weimer of Pueblo, Colorado, for inventing Under-Ease, airtight underwear with a replaceable charcoal filter that removes bad-smelling gases before they escape.

Economics: Joel Slemrod, of the University of Michigan Business School, and Wojciech Kopczuk, of University of British Columbia, for their conclusion that people would find a way to postpone their deaths if that that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax. ('Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity', Wojciech Kopczuk and Joel Slemrod, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. W8158, March 2001.)

Literature: John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural and possessive.

Psychology: Lawrence W. Sherman of Miami University, Ohio, for his influential research report 'An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children, published in Child Development, vol. 46, no. 1, March 1975, pp. 53-61.

Astrophysics: Dr Jack and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell.

Peace: Viliumas Malinauskus of Grutas, Lithuania, for creating the amusement park known as 'Stalin World'.

Public Health: Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, for their probing medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among adolescents ('A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample', Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, vol. 62, no. 6, June 2001, pp.426-31.)