The Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) is a real publication. The same group that produces the magazine annually weeds through more than 5,000 nominations to find 10 winners for the Ig Nobel Prizes. To date, 150 Ig Nobels have been bestowed, all in rather spirited ceremonies in a prestigious hall at Harvard University. Last night, I attended an event hosted by AIR for AAAS meeting attendees. It’s a decade-plus tradition of noting selections from previous years. Only attendees who got to the room early got seats, but that didn’t deter people from lining the walls or plopping down on the floor for the duration of the laugh-out-loud event.
Marc Abrahams, who edits AIR and hosted the AAAS session, says the research of Ig Nobel winners first makes people laugh and then makes them think. “What they think is up to them,” he adds.
As reported in C&EN this past fall, the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to a team who determined that humans swim at the same speed in water as they do in maple syrup. Last night, two sets of witty 2002 Ig Nobel winners discussed their work.
First up, Theo Gray. He won the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating a periodic table table: a piece of furniture suitable for meetings shaped like the periodic table. In fact, each square contains a sample of the element in the table. He brought along an 11-lb sample of tungsten and mentioned that after he won the award, Oliver Sacks, came to see it. (Sacks’s book “Uncle Tungsten” contains passages that Gray attributes as indirect inspiration for his project.) Despite a collection of about 1,000 samples of the elements, Gray is still looking for a good piece of technetium.
The 2002 winners of the Ig Nobel Prize in Literature have something chemists who have bought used textbooks full of highlights might be interested to know. Vicki Silvers Gier and David Kreiner at Central Missouri State University published a research paper called “The Effects of Pre-existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension.” Their research shows that if the previous book owner highlighted unimportant stuff, the new owner wouldn’t learn as well. Keep in mind, however, that test subjects provided with appropriately highlighted materials didn’t necessarily pass their tests either. Kreiner mentioned that he had met another researcher who replicated their study, and Gier said teachers who educate other teachers note (but do not necessarily highlight) their award-winning research.
—Rachel Petkewich, filed at 8:11 AM CST