Weird Science

WEIRD SCIENCE
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Discoveries that will make you laugh, then make you think
by Marc Abrahams


As the editor of a science magazine - albeit a funny one - I was continually besieged by people who wanted my help in winning a Nobel Prize.
I always explained that I had no influence on these matters, but they invariably told me in great detail what they'd done and why they deserved a prize. In some cases, they were correct. They deserved a prize all right, but not a Nobel Prize. And so, with the help of some friends and colleagues, I started the annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony.
The first was held in October 1991. Now, each year the science humor magazine I currently edit, 'Annals of Improbable Research', awards ten Ig Nobel Prizes to people whose achievements, though not precisely ignoble, "cannot or should not be reproduced."
The "Igs" (as the awards are known) honor scientists and inventors who have done remarkably goofy things - some admirable, some perhaps otherwise. Genuine Nobel laureates present the Ig Nobel Prizes to the winners at Harvard. A friendly, standing-room-only audience of 1,200 gives a warm welcome with wild applause and paper airplanes.
Here are a few especially memorable Ig Nobel laureates:

IN COMPUTER SCIENCE
Chris Niswander of Tucson, Ariz., was honored for inventing PawSense, software that detects when a cat is walking across your computer keyboard. "Cats can enter random commands and data, damage your computer," explained Niswander, a computer scientist. When PawSense detects a cat on the keyboard, it emits a blast of loud harmonica music, or a recording of someone hissing.
The inventor says that in addition to the sounds, once a cat has been recognized, PawSense blocks the cat's keyboard input. It puts up a giant message on the computer screen: "Cat-like Typing Detected." To unlock the screen, the program requests that you type the word 'human'. A cat might beat the system through a lucky combination of paw blows, but its odds of doing so are low.

IN CHEMISTRY
George Goble of Purdue University was distinguished for his world-record time igniting a barbecue grill – three seconds, using charcoal and liquid oxygen. 
Frustrated by the 40 minutes it normally took to get the grill going, Goble, a computer engineer, and some of his friends experimented with alternative forms of ignition. The procedure they eventually developed is simplicity itself. Goble asks someone to throw a lit cigarette onto the grill. Then he pours three gallons of liquid oxygen onto the cigarette from an eight-foot-long wooden pole. Spectators are kept at an almost reasonable distance.
"Don't stare at the flame unless you squint," Goble advises them. "It's like the sun." (He also cautions, "Don't try this at home" – advice that could be called glaringly obvious.)
While a cheap grill is entirely consumed by the fire, a sturdier model can survive two or three liquid-oxygen barbecues before all traces of it vanish. Having achieved a consistent sub-four-second ignition time, and having had threats from local fire officials to report him to law enforcement, Goble has stated that he will no longer prepare ultra-fast-food in this manner.

IN TECHNOLOGY
The prize was awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent Office for granting him Innovation Patent No. 2001100012. (Keogh has since surrendered the patent.) "Melbourne Man Tries to Patent the Wheel," screamed the headline in the July 2, 2001, issue of the Australian newspaper 'The Age'. The article went on to explain: "Freelance patent attorney John Keogh was issued with an Innovation Patent for a 'circular transportation facilitation device.' But he has no immediate plans to patent fire, drop rotation or other fundamental advances in civilization."
Mr. Keogh stated in his videotaped Ig Nobel acceptance speech that he had wanted "to expose a key weakness in Australia's new innovation-patent system, which requires the Australian Patent Office to grant a patent for virtually anything that is applied for." The Patent Office's own website (IPAustralia.gov.au) advises applicants to examine existing patents, adding, "Don't reinvent the wheel."

IN ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
When businessmen come home to their wives after a hard night of drinking and smoking for professional purposes, they can, through no fault of their own, smell bad. Hyuk-ho Kwon of Kolon Company in Seoul, South Korea, was awarded an Ig Nobel prize for inventing the self-perfuming business suit. The fabric is soaked in micro-encapsulated peppermint scent; even a slight motion releases the fragrance.
Kwon traveled from Seoul at his company's expense to attend the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. The Kolon Company generously made self-perfuming business suits for the five Nobel laureates who participated in the event, as well as for the master of ceremonies.
Another breakthrough in defensive dressing won an Ig Nobel prize...

IN SAFETY ENGINEERING
At age 20, while out panning for gold in the Canadian wilderness, Troy Hurtubise of North Bay, Ontario, had a frightening encounter with a grizzly, and has devoted his time ever since to creating a bear-proof suit. The basic design was influenced by the powerful humanoid-policeman-futuristic robot character in 'RoboCop'. The earliest model was made mostly of scrounged sporting equipment.
By the late 1990s, Hurtubise had spent seven years and, by his estimate, $150,000 Canadian, developing the seven-foot-two-inch, 147-pound "Mark VI" bear-defying suit of armor. As Hurtubise described it: "the exo-skeleton id titanium. The outside rubber base protects the electronics. For two years I had a problem getting them to bond. So to bond the rubber to the titanium, I coated the inside of the suit – which you can't see – with 7,630 feet of duct tape."
Hurtubise has subjected the suit to every large, sudden force he could devise. For almost all of the testing, he was locked inside the bulky suit, despite his being severely claustrophobic. Hurtubise's research has come at a cost, though, leading him at one point into bankruptcy.
Hurtubise's acceptance speech summed up the spirit of the Ig Nobel Prizes: "There are those who ridicule the Ig Nobels. But one always has to remember that when you exclude laughter from science, you've got a discipline that's pretty mundane and boring. So I think the Ig Nobels are needed."