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Each section links to a RealVideo prize-presentation excerpt from the award ceremony for the 1999 Ig Nobel prizes (which, as always, were awarded for research that could not - or should not - be repeated). The entire broadcast is available at the Ig Nobel Prize Web site. (56K minimum connection required for viewing.)
"Can I sniff your suit?" I ask Hyuk-ho Kwon, who's sitting quietly in the back of an empty auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kwon had earlier received the Ig Nobel Prize in Environmental Protection for inventing a self-perfuming business suit. The young engineer nods enthusiastically while scratching at a small patch on his left jacket sleeve. The blue-gray suit, it turns out, is impregnated with microcapsules that contain the fragrance. Rubbing the fabric breaks the capsules and releases the perfume.
"Mmm, peppermint," I note. The odor is not unpleasant, if you like your man to smell like a candy cane. The concept, explains Kwon, dates back to ancient Egypt. The Egyptians were the first to discover that aromas have the power to soothe or excite the human psyche. In particular, peppermint and lavender are believed to relieve stress and relax the smeller. Perhaps in the future, SWAT team flak jackets and riot gear will defuse angry mobs by enveloping them in a calming cloud of lavender essence.
Kolon International Corp. of Seoul - the company that supports Kwon's work - has already sold some 10,000 suits in Korea, and has enough fabric to produce 100,000 more. Kwon, for one, takes this scratch 'n' sniff suit quite seriously. "The most important scientific research must have practical applications in everyday life," he observes. Indeed, the scent "makes your head clearer and helps you think better," adds Kolon's Terry Jung, who will be in charge of marketing the suits in the United States.
In addition to soothing jangled nerves, the scented suit may have other domestic applications - maintaining marital tranquility, for example. "When a man returns home after staying out drinking and smoking all night, all he has to do is rub off his suit at the front door," says Kwon. What wife wouldn't be delighted to welcome home a wayward husband who smells so minty fresh? For this reason, Kwon believes he should have been awarded the Ig Nobel peace prize.
Aromatherapy is a new avenue of research for Kwon, who studied textile engineering at Korea's Kyung Puk University in Taegu. Previously, Kwon worked on clothing that would protect the wearer from potentially harmful electromagnetic waves - the sort that emanate from the cell phones, beepers, computers, and other electronic travel companions that we hold near and dear. In this case, the fabric is coated with nickel or copper, Kwon says as he exposes his jacket liner and his somewhat shiny metal-plated vest. Two-bit American hucksters could learn a thing or two by observing Kwon's graceful movements and sweet smile, I think.
In future, Kolon Corp. plans to put its money where your nose is, says Jung. On the drawing board: a "diet suit" scented with a natural appetite suppressant. As I wonder what such an outfit might smell like, I notice that Jung, the marketing guru, is not wearing a perfumed suit. "I get tired of people asking if they can smell the suit," he says. "So I tell them I'm wearing scented underwear and they go away."
What do you get when you hand a physical chemist a cup of tea and a cookie? After a bit of trial and error, you wind up with a mathematical formula for calculating the optimal way to dunk your afternoon snack.
That research earned Len Fisher of the University of Bristol this year's Ig Nobel Prize in Physics. The calculations involve understanding the porosity of the cookie, the viscosity of the tea, and how quickly the tea seeps into the sweet snack. Think of the cookie as a material made of starch glued together by sugar, suggests Fisher. Dunking the aggregate into the tea will allow the sugar to dissolve and the starch to swell, causing the cookie to crumble (and turning the tea into a lumpy wet mess). The secret, says Fisher, is determining how long liquid takes to reach the midpoint of the biscuit.
If anyone could figure this out, it's Fisher. A physical chemist by training, Fisher received his Ph.D. in Australia for studying how the properties of a material's surface affect its behavior. He applied his understanding of surface chemistry and solution dynamics to the study of foods that form colloids or emulsions, such as milk. "I spent so much time on these problems that soon people believed that I know what I'm talking about," he laughs.
At the request of McVitie's, a biscuit manufacturer in the United Kingdom, Fisher brought the tricks of his trade to bear on the dunking problem. "They thought they could get some idiot to study the science of biscuit dunking," he says. Fisher stepped up to the plate for several reasons. "First, the money," he says. Next, because the biscuit maker donated the proceeds from the resulting ad campaign to charity. Finally, he says, "I wanted to help make science accessible to nonscientists." His plan appears to have worked. "My wife even overheard people at the hairdresser talking about it."
The results depend on the biscuit, says Fisher. Some cookies stand up to dunking better than others. Ginger-nut biscuits, for example, are really quite strong, says Fisher, who subjected his cookies to a force transducer to measure the amount of pressure it would take to make them crack. "Even half-wet, it takes one kilogram of force to break one of those." In the end, he found, the chocolate-coated cookie is the ultimate dipping biscuit. "Chocolate is a crack-stopper," explains Fisher. Because chocolate is somewhat flexible, it can hold a soggy cookie together long enough to get it to your mouth.
According to Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and the Ig Nobel emcee, Nobel-Prize winning physicist Stephen Hawking feels that Fisher's work "deserves a real Nobel Prize." Fisher, for his part, is delighted simply at getting folks thinking about the science of the commonplace. One youngster even sent him data on dunking donuts. "I was very pleased," says Fisher. "Stimulating a kid's interest in science, it's just great."
The results, though, haven't affected the way Fisher eats a cookie, he says. "I very seldom dunk, anyway."
"I'm obsessed by donuts," says Steve Penfold, a graduate student at York University in Toronto who is writing a doctoral dissertation on the sociology of the Canadian donut shop. As a reward for this passion for fried dough and its purveyors, Penfold received the 1999 Ig Nobel Prize in Sociology.
Sure it sounds silly, but to Penfold the donut is no joke. Canadians consume six times the number of donuts per capita as Americans; it's a billion-dollar industry. And studying the donut, he says, will reveal information about the Canadian economy, the evolution of urban space, the identity of the population, and the mass culture that defines everyday life. "Follow the donut and it will tell you everything," says Penfold, smirking.
His love of donuts stems, in part, from childhood experience. Growing up in suburban Toronto, Penfold fondly remembers afternoons spent with his father sipping hot chocolate at the local Tim Horton's donut shop. Now the future "Dr. Donut, Ph.D." receives scores of emails each day, often from expatriate Canadians who want to tell him how much they miss the donuts. When AIR editor Marc Abrahams first contacted Penfold about the Ig Nobel prize, the young Canadian thought Abrahams was "just someone else trying to tell me something about donuts."
And when he realized that he'd been chosen to receive an Ig? "I guess I was supposed to be honored," says Penfold. Instead he was a tad confused. As it happens, studying donuts is not seen as all that unusual in Canada, notes Penfold. Our neighbors to the north recognize the value of the donut as the glutinous snack cake that holds society together. In a land where patriotism is seen as something of a joke, Penfold says that donuts are considered a symbol of national pride. Some heavily trafficked intersections support a donut shop on all four corners.
In future, more sociologists are likely to be looking to consumer products as a means of understanding mass culture. For his next project, Penfold plans to join forces with his colleague Sharon Wall to study the marshmallow. It's a mass-produced, artificial food that's often associated, paradoxically, with nature - sitting around the campfire in the great outdoors. Thus Penfold sees the marshmallow as a symbol of the "dynamic tension of life in modern society." The proposed title of his pending study: "The Marshmallow Is the Twentieth Century."
Penfold plans to continue to specialize in subjects that sound goofy on the surface, but which should ultimately lead him to a deeper understanding of sociological phenomena. "Academia can get kind of boring," he notes, his heart set on becoming the first "chair of snack food studies" at York. "It's nice to know that when things get dull I can always say 'I work on - the donut.'"
The premise was a simple one. "I have always been amused by the different sorts of containers in which patients bring me their urine samples," explains Arvid Vatle, a physician in Stord, Norway. "And so I embarked on a study that Marc Abrahams regards as a landmark in medical history." Over the course of a year, Vatle collected, classified, and contemplated every urine-filled container he received.
Their selections, Vatle found, were not only ingenious but well-cleansed. "I was rather pleasantly surprised never to get a positive glucose reaction in a container that had originally held a sweet drink or food," he says. And the variety was also staggering. Of the 164 samples Vatle collected, he catalogued 110 different container types - bottles and jars that had previously cradled all manner of food, drink, medicine, spice, perfume, and personal hygiene products.
By far, the most frequently used container was a jar of tomato puree. This led Vatle to wonder whether tomato puree might be causing urinary tract infections. Or perhaps the consumers of crushed tomatoes are more health conscious than their puree-poor neighbors, and thus more likely to wind up visiting their doctor with samples. Or maybe Norwegians just like tomato puree. The fact that the jar has a wide opening and a lid that seals effectively certainly didn't hurt, notes Vatle.
Did the nature of the sample container ever reveal anything about the patient? One elderly gentleman, for example, transported his first urine sample in a large Scotch bottle; the second in a bottle that had formerly contained a fine Finnish vodka. "Did he bring the bottles as a cry for help? Did he hold stock in the companies? Or did he want to demonstrate defiantly against the health department of Norway?" Vatle still wonders.
The study, sadly, left many of these burning questions unanswered. How, for example, did patients get their urine into bottles that had tiny openings, such as perfume flagons? "I don't know," admits Vatle, "but I was impressed with the degree of precision that some persons seem to have exercised in collecting their samples."
Some may say that studying urine containers is a waste, but Vatle notes that "basically it was good fun." And though the subject matter may be a bit unusual, Vatle's conclusion is not an unfamiliar one: "Further research is necessary," he says with a smile.
Adultery is big business in Japan. "It's no exaggeration to say that Japanese detectives make their living investigating immorality," states Takeshi Makino, president of the Safety Detective Agency in Osaka. "Half of my business involves looking into illicit love affairs."
But looking is not all that Makino does. He and his colleagues will be taking home an Ig Nobel Prize for their work with S-check, an infidelity detection spray that wives can apply to their husbands' underwear.
The spray is used to detect any traces of semen that may remain in an unfaithful spouse's undergarments. The chemical formulation is proprietary, of course, but the basic concept is familiar to forensic scientists. Chemicals present in the S-check formula react with components in semen, producing a molecule that reacts with a brightly colored dye. Semen, it's said, is secreted for several hours after intercourse - hence the telltale traces in the cheater's briefs.
Spraying a bit of S-check around, it turns out, is much easier than catching the culprit with his pants down, notes Makino. Imagine an investigation. "The trains are crowded at commuter time and traffic jams are everywhere," he says. "At 5 p.m., a crowd of men come out of each building like ants. They all wear blue suits, they all part their short hair the same way, they all look tired. They all look the same - even to a private detective," says Makino, who considers himself the "number two" private eye in the country. ("Who is number one even I don't know," he jokes.)
S-check should prove a "reliable ally" for women who suspect their husbands of fooling around, says Makino. The signs of infidelity include: coming home late, spending lots of money, lack of communication, loss of sexual interest, and "cold-hearted temper."
As women gain more power in Japanese society, they've become less afraid to dump a spouse whose ideas about marriage turn out to be less than modern, notes Makino. Nearly 250,000 Japanese marriages end in divorce each year - a good percentage of which are destroyed by domestic violence or immoral behavior on the part of the husband. For his part, Makino would like to change the statistics. "Love affairs are like a disease: it's important to detect the symptoms and begin treatment as early as possible," he explains. "I would be happy if S-check could help prevent the collapse of happy families due to illicit love affairs by the husband."
Makino's company currently sells about 200 S-check kits each month. But American adulterers need not fear - the product is not yet available in the United States. Even if it were, Makino offers this simple advice to future philanderers: "All you have to remember is not to wear underwear afterwards."
Some like it hot. And, it stands to reason, others don't. That's where Paul Bosland and his colleagues at the Chile Pepper Institute of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces come in. For years, Bosland and his crack chile team have been laboring to breed a spiceless jalapeno pepper.
Like most of the other Ig-honored research, this project, too, has some serious purpose. Think mild salsa. "Jalapenos are usually very, very hot," notes Bosland. But the salsa industry churns out tons of not-so-hot chip dip for those who lack fireproof mouthparts (such as Easterners, Bosland observes). How can they do that?
Well, they could use fewer jalapenos and mix in more tomatoes or bell peppers. But that alters the flavor of the salsa. Enter the non-pungent jalapeno pepper. By mixing in some jalapenos that lack kick, salsa makers can produce a milder mix that still tastes like Old Mejico (or is it New Mexico?).
The trick is in the breeding, says Bosland, who studied plant genetics in Wisconsin before taking his post as the head of the Chile Pepper Institute in New Mexico. To tame the jalapeno, he and his colleagues crossed a jalapeno plant with the related bell pepper and then selected for milder chiles that retained the jalapeno flavor. The resulting pepper bears a smaller placenta - the thin strip of tissue inside the chile fruit that gives the pepper its pungency.
But wimpy salsa fans aren't the only ones who benefit from a milder chile pepper. Spiceless red chiles are used to make paprika - a coloring agent that is widely used in all sorts of food products. Chile pepper ain't the Number One consumed spice in the world for nuthin', says Bosland.
The chile pepper's bite is controlled, in large part, by a family of chemicals called capsaicinoids. And researchers at the Chile Pepper Institute are now examining how individual capsaicinoids contribute to a pepper's punch. The dozen or so capsaicinoid compounds in the jalapeno, for example, produce a stinging sensation on the tip of the tongue and the lips. The capsaicinoid profile of the habanero pepper, on the other hand, produces heat in the back of the mouth and the throat.
It may seem a silly exercise in masochistic mastication, but Bosland believes such studies have broader relevance. The food industry, for one, would prefer to use chiles that produce a heat that hits fast but dissipates rapidly. That should encourage the consumer to reach for the next mouthful.
Doctors are looking for a different effect. Physicians who treat people with chronic pain sometimes use capsaicin-containing ointments to stimulate the body's own pain-killing mechanisms. In this case, they'd want their chile liniment to generate a somewhat gentler, but more lingering heat.
"We'd like to be able to manipulate the capsaicinoid profile of the chiles to achieve that range," says Bosland. Until then, he humbly notes, he's happy to continue in his efforts to "educate the public about the wonders of chiles." As for his Ig, Bosland promises to treat his award with the proper respect. "I'll hang it in my closet with great reverence."
This year, the Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong of Johannesburg, South Africa, for inventing a device to deter carjacking. It consists of a foot switch connected to a flamethrower.
"I don't know why you find this humorous," says Wong, who is married to Fourie. Car hijacking is rampant in South Africa and it ranks among the most violent crimes, she notes. Fourie, a former lawyer, came up with the concept of the Blaster as a way to "protect his family - which is me," says Wong.
To activate the flamethrower, the driver depresses a foot pedal. This sends a stream of liquefied gas gushing through a nozzle, where it gets ignited by electric sparks. As a result, balls of flame shoot from both sides of the vehicle, "incapacitating" any attackers.
Columns of flame may seem like overkill, but Wong feels that such an approach is warranted given the violent nature of the crime. "Even if you have a gun - and we do carry guns - carjackers will approach with three, four, five people. There's no way you're going to stop them. This device may just prevent them from getting you."
The Blaster is not available for sale outside South Africa, says Wong. "Most countries aren't as dangerous as this one."
Other Igs
Literature - to the British Standards Institution for its six-page specification of the proper way to make a cup of tea.
Science Education - to the Kansas and Colorado Boards of Education for mandating that children should not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution any more than they believe in Newton's theory of gravitation, Faraday's and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, or Pasteur's theory that germs cause disease.
Managed Health Care - to the late George and Charlotte Blonsky of New York City and San Jose, California, for inventing a device to aid women in giving birth (U.S. Patent No. 3,216,423). The woman is strapped onto a circular table, and the table is then rotated at high speed.
Note: The 1999 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Len Fisher of the University of Bristol (whose work is described above) and to Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck of the University of East Anglia, Belgium, for calculating how to make a teapot that doesn't drip. Professor Vanden-Broeck declined to be interviewed for this story.
Karen Hopkin is a freelance writer and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She holds a Ph.D in biochemistry.
Andrzej Krauze is an illustrator, poster maker, cartoonist, and painter who illustrates regularly for HMS Beagle, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, Bookseller, and New Statesman.
