Stuff You Should Know - What is an Ig Nobel Prize?

Episode Date: September 3, 2009

Each year, the Ig Nobel Prize is awarded to researchers for unusual -- and generally humorous -- contributions to science. Tune in as Josh and Chuck discuss the highlights of this unique awards ceremony in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Everybody loves Altoids, little mints that come in tents. Well, once the mints are gone, you can do some really neat things with the leftover tents. People have made empty three-players, cameras, even stoves. Check out HowStuffWorks.com slash 10-ovators to find out more. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark. With me is always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You sound like you're smiling big and you are. This is Stuff You Should Know, of course, I'm smiling. Yeah, why not? We're in the more happy chairs. Chuck, what is it? Like August, mid, late August?

August, right? Yeah, mid-August. Well, you know what that means, don't you? It means as hot as Hades in Atlanta. It is, it's gross, man. It keeps raining just long enough to soak the ground and then, boom, the sun comes out and it's muggy. Yeah, awful.

Yeah, I actually have spoken to people who have lived in New Orleans and they say that it is as bad as New Orleans these days. Really? Yeah, I believe it. Thank you, Al Gore. Yeah. Stupid global warming.

But that's not what you were gonna talk about anyway. I just totally sidetracked you, didn't I? Yeah, but I went with it, as is my way. So what does August mean? August means that we are to know one month and change away from the Ig Nobel Awards. Right. Not to be confused with the Darwin Awards.

No, which, Chuck, how many people sent us when we did that spontaneous human combustion? Yeah. Sent us that Darwin Award clip of that Indian man on top of the train. Yeah, getting electrocuted. Yeah, it was very distressing. It is.

And only about half of those said, be warned what you're about to watch. The others were like, check this out. Yeah. Kentucky Fried Dude. Yeah, normally I don't like watching people die. But that one, I don't know. I thought it was kind of interesting.

Yeah, distressing. Sure. So was he a Darwin Award winner? Yeah, I can't remember what for. But he was definitely an award winner. Yeah, the Darwin Awards are a different deal. Those people are generally chided for stupidity. And the Ig Nobel Prize winners are not made fun of.

Plus, the Ig Nobel Awards actually recognize honest to goodness genuine scientific research. Yep, left of center scientific research. A little bit. But scientific research nonetheless. So the Ig Nobel Awards are coming up, as I said, October 1st. They're actually going to have a live webcast this year.

Oh, really? Yeah, beginning at 7.15 Eastern Standard Time. And I imagine you'll be able to find the webcaster, at least a link to it, on improbableresearch.com. Right, well, NPR, every year broadcasts it the Friday after Thanksgiving. This year, it's the day before Thanksgiving. Oh, is it?

I believe so. Well, look at you. Yeah. But if you don't want to wait, and you want to see it live as it happened. Exactly. Yeah, Friday, November 27th, the day after Thanksgiving. So what are these, dude?

We should go ahead and tell people. It's a riff on two things, on the Nobel Prize and the word Ig Nobel, which means of low character or inferior quality. Right, and I have to say that Mark Abrams, the guy who is the editor of improbable research, which is a scientific humor magazine, now it's a website, he kind of does a little fancy footwork here, there.

What do you mean? Well, he says that they're not, yeah, he's like, we're not making fun of people, but we're making fun of people. But he calls it the Ig Nobel Prize. Right, he's saying like, this is actually to spark curiosity in science, but we're celebrating research that shouldn't be replicated or reproduced.

Yeah. It's kind of all over the place. He wants to have his cake and eat it too a little bit. He does, and boy howdy does he. Ever since, I think, 1991, they've handed out Ig Nobel Prizes for all sorts of stuff. Sure. And I like it, I think it's fun.

Sure, and most people do take it lightheartedly. I have a very famous case that I can go into later on. Someone who did not take it very lightheartedly, but it's meant to be very humorous. And if you look at some of the award winners every year, you can see why. So each year, they give a prize out for in 10 different categories, right?

Yes, you want me to go through those? Might as well. Those categories, Josh, are nutrition, peace, archaeology, biology, medicine, cognitive science, economics, physics, chemistry, and literature. Yeah, pretty cool. Like I said, this is actually legitimate research. Sometimes they're given out to patent holders.

But a lot of times also, if you've had a study published in a legitimate journal, you can, you're a candidate, you can be a candidate. I think they get like 5,000 nominations every year, and they sort through all of them. Right, you can nominate yourself. Right, and the study doesn't have to have been done in the year that the prizes are given out.

Oh, really? Yeah, actually, Chuck, back in 1994, some researchers at Wright Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, were working on a project that they entitled harassing, annoying, and bad guy identifying chemicals, right? Right. And they sought $7.5 million for research grants. So this is the real deal.

It is, I've actually seen the documents from the Air Force. And basically, what they were coming up with was a non-lethal project of chemicals that one of them was basically a chemical that they would launch behind enemy lines, and it would arouse the ire of stinging insects in the area. So they'd go and attack the enemy. Another one was to create, I think, chronic or prolonged

halitosis among enemy soldiers, so they couldn't stand to be around one another. And then there was the one that got the Ig Nobel award. Yes, the infamous gay bomb. Yes, it says that this is under the category three chemicals. Chemicals that affect human behavior, so that discipline and morale in enemy units is adversely affected.

One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong effer DGX, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior. So yeah, the Air Force was working on a gay bomb. How much money did they put toward this? Well, hold on, they won the 2007 Ig Nobel Peace Prize. The Peace Prize? Yeah.

That's good. How much money? $7.5 million. And that was 1994. Don't know what exactly came of it. And the Air Force didn't take kindly to this, correct? They did not show up to receive their award. Right, I don't think they ever had a statement to the contrary

that they were upset, but they didn't show up and say, hey, thanks. Right. This whole gay bomb thing didn't work out, but thanks. Thanks for the props. Right. Yeah. Who judges these things?

Actually, what's crazy is that some Nobel award winners, like real Nobel award winners, serve on the board of governors to decide who is going to get an Ig Nobel Prize. Right. You know who also has? The professor from Gilligan's Island. No.

Yeah. Holy cow. Russell Johnson served one year. Sweet. And apparently they do that. They get celebrities and certain actors and athletes to be on the panel. And they said, regular street, Joe's,

your average Joe off the street. They'll put them on the panel, too. Yeah, and it's held at Harvard. Yeah, well, it used to be at MIT and now it's at Harvard. They have a big ceremony every year. And I think the prize laureates are able to give a one-minute acceptance speech is all. Yeah, they have Little Miss Cutie Poo.

Yeah. Who has to, who basically shouts them off stage when they start exceeding their minute acceptance speech. Yeah. And the criteria for Little Miss Cutie Poo is that she must be an adorable eight-year-old with ice water in her veins and from the Boston area. Yeah.

And they're actually looking for applicants right now. So yeah, if you're listening in Boston and you're an eight-year-old. Terror. Yeah. You might want to apply. With a shrill voice. Yeah.

Bring it. Yeah. The award itself, Josh, is different every year, which is kind of cool. They have different designs each year. And one of them was the cereal box labeled Ig Nobel O's. Yeah. It's kind of fun.

And that actually kind of leads as a nice segue into the discussion about this one guy who very famously derided the Ig Nobel Awards as stifling science, or at the very least making fun of it. Yes, he was not happy about it. No. Bob May? Yeah.

It was in 1995. Bob May was the head of the science ministry for the UK. So he was pretty big cheese. I imagine you could put him on par with maybe the Surgeon General or the head of the National Science Foundation here. Right. And he came out and he wrote a letter to improbable research.

And he also had one published in Nature, where he just railed on the Ig Nobel organizers. Yeah. And improbable research. Yeah. He said not to ever award another one to anyone from England. No. And that was kind of like, hey, thanks.

The people who were getting the award that year had been doing research. They were from the University of East Anglia, who I have to say is a university that produces some really entertaining studies. But this one was the research into the effects or what makes soggy cereal or cereal soggy. That's good research.

Right. Well, he said, don't give it to these people. Don't ever give it to another British scientist again. And actually, he thought he had just put the final stamp of disapproval on it. Actually created this huge outcry in the scientific community about how stuffy the British scientific establishment is.

He's certainly not doing very much to quell stereotype disease. No, he wasn't. And in 2000, his successor actually went, no, 2002, actually went to the Ig Nobel Awards to basically show that, hey, Great Britain's back on board, baby. That's good. Yeah. I think science, the more you can laugh at certain things

and have fun with it, the better. Because you want to turn other people on to science. You don't want to turn them off by thinking that we're also stuffy and uptight that we can't laugh at ourselves. You just gave me yet another segue. Speaking of turning people on, the 2000. You're ready to travel in 2023. And since 1981, Gate One Travel has been providing more

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With as little as $1,000, you can join over 15,000 investors to help Apptera transform the future of transportation. Ig Nobel Prize winner for medicine was a guy named Dr. Peck Van Andel. Is that a real name? Yes, it is. He's, I think he's Dutch. Sounds like a pseudonym.

He won the 2,000, you would think it might be. He won the 2,000 Ig Nobel Prize for medicine for making the first MRI video of human reproductive organs while they're engaged in the act of coitus. And dude, yeah, I did. And it is an MRI porno. It's crazy. So basically, he had two people performing intercourse

inside an MRI machine for this. Wow. And yeah, he has a video of it. And it's up on YouTube, actually. It's an improbable research number 119, I believe. And I should probably say, if you are listening and you're listening to this at work and you're about to open another tab, you might want to take it easy.

Wait till you get home. And if you're 12, don't watch this yet. At least don't tell your parents that it was Josh and Chuck who told you about this. Right. Should we talk about some more of these prizes? Yeah, dude, it's time. I think Robert Lamb, who wrote this awesome piece of work,

probably had a lot of fun with this one, he wrote that in 2003, Keys W. Mulliker did a study on the existence of homosexual necrophiliac ducks. Mm-hmm. And this is all real. Yeah, it actually, this study led to dead duck day in the Netherlands now. Really?

Yeah. Well, funny you should say the Netherlands, because it was one in New Zealand about exploding pants among New Zealand farmers in the 1930s. Someone studied that too. Yeah, what was up with that? I have no idea. I didn't see the final outcome.

I went on the improbable research and found some other winners, Chuck. There's some pretty wacky stuff out there. Or at the very least, I mean, you have to think about it. When somebody undertakes this, this study, they're very serious about it. They want to get to the bottom of it. And obviously, if you look at it like the gay bomb,

they didn't say the gay bomb plus arousing steaming bees, and there's legitimate research associated with it. It's the gay bomb. They're picking out the funniest angle of looking at this. But there is some legitimate, there is very much legitimate research put into this. And you have to imagine funding for this research. Somebody said, OK, yeah, go check out

necrophiliac homosexual docs. And then it's published, usually, in a medical journal. I have one from last year that was pretty funny. In the field of chemistry, Sheri Oompierre, Joseph Hill, and Deborah Anderson discovered that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide. And CY Hong, CCCP Wu, and Bien Chiang accidentally prove that it is not an effective spermicide

in the same year. So they were both awarded the award for chemistry, which I thought was pretty funny. And they all showed up to receive it, to accept it. Yeah, both sides of the studies. I think it was last year, Chuck, that Ivan Arshwab and Philip R.A. May won the prize for ornithology. What was that?

They researched why woodpeckers don't get headaches. Really? Yeah. Or why they give people headaches, is what I would follow it up with. No. No. Last year in nutrition, this one I thought was pretty funny,

Brian Wansink investigated people's appetite for mindless eating. And his trick was he had a self-refilling bowl of soup in front of them that they didn't realize was constantly refilling itself. Awesome. You would study if they would just keep on eating and eating without thinking about it.

Awesome. I could go for a self-refilling bowl of soup. Really? Yeah. Depending on the soup. Loaded baked potato, definitely. Oh, yeah. I've got one.

You ready? Yeah. The Ig Nobel Prize for Mathematics in 2007 went to Nick Svensson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization. They calculated the number of photographs you have to take to ensure that nobody in a group photo

will have their eyes closed in one of them, yeah. Do you have the stat? No, I don't. But if you want the stat, you can read the June 2006 issue of Velocity. And the article is called Blink Free Photos, guaranteed. I've got one for you, too. We could do this all day.

We could, but this one actually could be real, have real applications. In aviation, they discovered that hamsters recover from jet lag more quickly when given Viagra. So there might be something to that. Jet lag is a problem for some people, and maybe something in the Viagra could actually help humans, because rats and hamsters and humans all kind

of are wired the same. Well, I don't know if it's groundbreaking research as much as it is just proving conventional wisdom, you know? Well, do you think so with Viagra? Everybody knows Viagra cures jet lag in rodents. OK, sorry. Yeah. You got another one?

I do. Can you tell by the look on my face? Yeah, you were gasping. 2007, the medicine prize went to some researchers from the University of Tennessee College of Medicine. They did some research into terminating hiccups by digital rectal massage. And digital, in this case, means your finger.

OK, you know, that's funny I read that earlier. I was like, how can you get a digital rectal massage? I was thinking digitizing. All right, I wasn't thinking fingers. That makes sense. You got any more you want to do, another couple? Actually, there was one. What?

The guy who'd studied strippers and found that strippers get more tips when they're ovulating. Yeah, they won the economics prize last year. I thought that was pretty interesting. Yeah. So in essence, it's a lot of fun. You know, they're kind of poking fun, but it is some legitimate research going on.

And I just think it's a good time. I agree. And if you're interested in checking it out, as I said, the Ig Nobel prizes are going to be on. There's going to be a live webcast at 7.15 Eastern on October 1st. If you want to find out who ends up being Miss Cutie Poo for 2009, it'll be revealed then.

How about for Josh? In a wig. Eight-year-old, steely cold. Yeah. Yeah, I could hear it. Yeah. So Chuck, I guess that's it, right? You want to read this?

I have to say you said Robert Lam wrote a great article. I agree. I think this article has one of the best introductions on the site. Yeah, it's a good one. You can find that by typing in Ig and then Space and Nobel on the handysearchbar on howstuffworks.com. And since I said that, that means, my friends,

that it is time for listener mail. Yes, indeed, Josh. I'm just going to call this answer to our query about the biggest badass of World War II. Yes, Chuck. I'm very excited about this one. We got a lot of response text. We called, if you remember correctly, just a recap.

We did a thing on Japanese stragglers. Wait, let's go to the way back machine and listen to what we said. OK. In contrast to you, Koi, was the baddest dude in World War II, probably. As a matter of fact, I invite our listeners to email us, anybody who can want any single individual who

can top the man we're about to talk about, in badness, OK? I agree. And Josh will personally email you back and debate you. And there it is. So we posted that Onada was one of the biggest rambos of the war. Sure. And we challenged people to send in someone bad. Yeah.

And people did. Yeah. We got a lot of responses. Yeah, but there was one that had overwhelming support. There was. There were actually a couple. We want to give a special, I guess you would call it, a runner up to Audie Murphy.

Yeah. Famous American actor and soldier. Yeah. Babyface, like a buck 25. But yeah, if you started shooting at him, he went crazy. And he was awesome. And he was super bad. But I think he gets a little attention

because he was a real small guy. And he was American. And he was American. He had such a cherub face. Like people think, wow, man, he's extra bad because he was tough and he's so little. We got some votes. There was some British guy that was pretty bad,

another couple of Japanese dudes. But wait, you got another one? No, OK. But we have a winner. Yes, clear winner. This guy is so bad. This is Simo Haiha. The nickname for him was White Death.

Yes. Can I tell this guy's story? Please. All right, so he was a Finnish farmer. And he was just basically doing his own thing when the Russians invaded Finland. The Winter War. Yes.

He didn't like this one bit. So basically he took a standard bolt action rifle without a sight. Yeah, no head sight, no scope. No scope, sorry, yes. And went out into the woods, the subarctic woods of Finland, where it gets to about 40 degrees below Fahrenheit, and just basically set up in trees or in blinds and waited.

And he didn't have to wait very long over the course of one year. Just using this old rifle, he killed 500 Russians. 505. As a sniper. As a sniper. A lot of these people, when the Russians were finally alerted that there was one sniper out there, there was

causing them all these problems, they sent detachments with the specific mission of going to kill him. Find the White Death. Yeah, that's when he got the name the White Death. So they send detachment after detachment out, and he just murders every single one of them. Yeah, he killed 200 people with a submachine gun.

So that would, I guess, would be the close-up fight. Right, so he's up to 705. 705 confirmed kills in a year. Finally, somebody gets close enough to shoot him in the face with an exploding bullet. And it's still didn't kill him. Yep, he was shot in the jaw. Rumor has it that he shot the other sniper

before losing consciousness. So the guy that just shot him, before he passed out, he killed him. Immediate retribution. And the guy who wrote in with the best email says, unofficially, he had over 800 kills. And this was in under 100 days. It was less than a year.

Wow. So he said, he was just a killing machine. Think about it, that is at least five kills per day, plus 200 kills with a World War II submachine gun. And he still didn't die. No, he lost consciousness and woke up apparently the day World War II ended. Yeah, and he lived until 1998.

So I think the white death, I'm going to vote for him. Oh, hands down, he is the biggest badass of World War II. Yeah, although some people are going to write in and say, yeah, but this was sniper stuff. And Audie Murphy fought people with a knife. I've got to tell you, Audie Murphy is to me a very close second, but the white death, first of all, the name alone, 40 degrees below Fahrenheit,

just sitting out there sniping Russians. I mean, I think he wins the award, in my opinion. He does. So I want to give credit where credit is due here. We want to thank Carson from Toronto. Actually, that's a joke. I'm making a joke. He's actually from Edmonton.

And he said, please don't say I'm from Toronto. And he also said something about eating heaven heroes and mentioning that so his friends would know it's really him. OK. So Carson, we've done so. So Carson from Edmonton, Timon in New York City, Devin from Georgia, and Adrian all wrote in with white death. And I think they're actually more self-electual.

Yeah, no, they definitely don't snipe me. And also, there's a really cool article, Cracked.com, about Rambo, or basically real life soldiers who make Rambo look like something or other. Yeah, I was. Yeah, that was worth reading. And if you want to send us an email about anything at all, white death or otherwise,

you can send that to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the HowStuffWorks.com homepage. Hey, if you're a fan of Altoids, the curiously strong mints, you probably have a lot of empty tins laying around. You can do some pretty cool stuff with them.

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