The 2007 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

The 2007 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 4, at
the 17th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders
Theatre. The ceremony was webcast.

PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda
Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how
sheets become wrinkled.
REFERENCES:
"Wrinkling of an Elastic Sheet Under Tension," E. Cerda, K.
Ravi-Chandar, L. Mahadevan, Nature, vol. 419, October 10, 2002, pp.
579-80.
"Geometry and Physics of Wrinkling," E. Cerda and L. Mahadevan,
Physical Review Letters, fol. 90, no. 7, February 21, 2003, pp.
074302/1-4.
"Elements of Draping," E. Cerda, L. Mahadevan and J. Passini,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 101, no. 7,
2004, pp. 1806-10.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, and Enrique
Cerda Villablanca's sister Mariela.

MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch,
Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report " Sword
Swallowing and Its Side Effects."
REFERENCE: "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects," Brian Witcombe and
Dan Meyer, British Medical Journal, December 23, 2006, vol. 333, pp.
1285-7.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer

BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven
University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all
the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria,
algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.
REFERENCES:
" Huis, Bed en Beestjes" [House, Bed and Bugs], J.E.M.H. van
Bronswijk, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, vol. 116, no. 20,
May 13, 1972, pp. 825-31.
" Het Stof, de Mijten en het Bed" [Dust, Mites and Bedding]. J.E.M.H.
van Bronswijk Vakblad voor Biologen, vol. 53, no. 2, 1973, pp. 22-5.
"Autotrophic Organisms in Mattress Dust in the Netherlands," B. van de
Lustgraaf, J.H.H.M. Klerkx, J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Acta Botanica
Neerlandica, vol. 27, no. 2, 1978, pp 125-8.
"A Bed Ecosystem," J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Lecture Abstracts -- 1st
Benelux Congress of Zoology, Leuven, November 4-5, 1994, p. 36.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk

CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan,
for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and
flavoring -- from cow dung.
REFERENCE: "Novel Production Method for Plant Polyphenol from
Livestock Excrement Using Subcritical Water Reaction," Mayu Yamamoto,
International Medical Center of Japan.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Mayu Yamamoto
PRESS NOTE: Toscanini's Ice Cream, the finest ice cream shop in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a new ice cream flavor in honor of
Mayu Yamamoto, and introduced it at the Ig Nobel ceremony. The flavor
is called "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist."

LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria
Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats
sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking
Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
REFERENCE: "Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in
Language Discrimination by Rats," Juan M. Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and
Núria Sebastián-Gallés, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal
Behavior Processes, vol. 31, no. 1, January 2005, pp 95-100.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The winners could not travel to the
ceremony, so they instead delivered their acceptance speech via
recorded video

LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for
her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems
for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.
REFERENCE: " The Definite Article: Acknowledging 'The' in Index
Entries," Glenda Browne, The Indexer, vol. 22, no. 3 April 2001, pp.
119-22.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Glenda Browne

PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for
instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the
so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually
irresistible to each other.
REFERENCE: " Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying
Chemicals," Wright Laboratory, WL/FIVR, Wright Patterson Air Force
Base, Ohio, June 1, 1994.

NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the
seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a
self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.
REFERENCE: " Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May
Influence Intake," Brian Wansink, James E. Painter and Jill North,
Obesity Research, vol. 13, no. 1, January 2005, pp. 93-100.
REFERENCE: Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian
Wansink, Bantom Books, 2006, ISBN 0553804340.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Brian Wansink.

ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a
device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net
over them.
REFERENCE: U.S. patent #6,219,959, granted on April 24, 2001, for a
"net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately."
NOTE: The Ig Nobel Board of Governors has attempted repeatedly to find
Mr. Hsieh, but he seems to have vanished mysteriously. [Breaking news:
Mr. Hsieh reportedly has seen a news account of the Ig Nobel ceremony,
and contacted the news agency. Details soon.]

AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A.
Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their
discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
REFERENCE: " Sildenafil Accelerates Reentrainment of Circadian Rhythms
After Advancing Light Schedules," Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A.
Plano and Diego A. Golombek, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, vol. 104, no. 23, June 5 2007, pp. 9834-9.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Diego A. Golombek

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