Spoof awards by Annals of Improbable Research.
By The American Bazaar Staff
NEW YORK: Two Indian scientists, Dr. Sonal Saraiya and Naren Ramakrishnan, have won prizes at the annual Ig Nobel awards for their offbeat research work.
The spoof awards, run by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, were handed out at their annual ceremony at Harvard University.
Saraiya and her colleagues in Michigan found that packing strips of cured pork onto a child’s nasal cavity could stop life-threatening nosebleeds, reported the BBC.
Ramakrishnan and his colleagues investigated correlations in data on cat bites and depression.
The tongue-in-cheek Ig Nobel awards for “improbable research” have become almost as famous as the real Nobels.
This year’s winner was a study which looked at why bananas are slippery when you step on them.
Dr Saraiya and her colleagues at Michigan’s Detroit Medical Center found that packing strips of cured pork in the nose of a child suffering from life-threatening nosebleeds can stop the haemorrhaging, said the BBC.
She said this worked only when conventional treatments failed and was only used for a very rare condition in which blood does not clot properly.
“We had to do some out-of-the-box thinking,” Saraiya said. “So that’s where we put our heads together and thought to the olden days and what they used to do.”
According to her team’s study the four-year-old child’s nostrils were packed with cured pork twice and “the nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal haemorrhage promptly (and) effectively.”
The method worked because “there are some clotting factors in the pork … and the high level of salt will pull in a lot of fluid from the nose”.
Ramakrishnan picked up the ‘public health prize’ along with colleagues for investigating correlations between cat bites and depression.
The abstract of their paper says that “recent data mining studies have suggested a potential association between cat bites and human depression”.
Their research showed that the “the high proportion of depression in patients who had cat bites, especially among women, suggests that screening for depression could be appropriate in patients who present to a clinical provider with a cat bite”.
“While no causative link is known to explain this association, there is growing evidence to suggest that the relationship between cats and human mental illness, such as depression, warrants further investigation”.
The Boston Globe reported that scientist Kiyoshi Mabuchi of Japan researched whether banana peels are actually as slippery as cartoons depict them to be.
“I have gotten … evidence that the friction under banana peels is sufficiently low to make us slip,” Mabuchi told the AP in an email. The study was an extension of his research into human joint lubrication system.
The full list of this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes, as reported by the Associated Press:
Physics: Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that’s on the floor.
Neuroscience: Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian and Kang Lee, for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.
Psychology: Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones and Minna Lyons, for amassing evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative and more psychopathic than people who habitually arise early in the morning.
Public health: Jaroslav Flegr, Jan Havlicek, Jitka Hanusova-Lindova, David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan and Lisa Seyfried, for investigating whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat.
Biology: Vlastimil Hart, Petra Novakova, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladimír Hanzal, Milos Jezek, Tomas Kusta, Veronika Nemcova, Jana Adamkova, Katerina Benediktova, Jaroslav Cerveny and Hynek Burda, for carefully documenting that when dogs defecate and urinate, they prefer to align their body axis with Earth’s north-south geomagnetic field lines.
Art: Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro and Paolo Livrea, for measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather than a pretty painting, while being shot (in the hand) by a powerful laser beam.
Economics: ISTAT, the Italian government’s National Institute of Statistics, for proudly taking the lead in fulfilling the European Union mandate for each country to increase the official size of its national economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling and other unlawful financial transactions. Reference: ISTAT website.
Medicine: Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, for treating “uncontrollable” nosebleeds, using the method of nasal-packing-with-strips-of-cured-pork.
Arctic science: Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl, for testing how reindeer react to seeing humans who are disguised as polar bears.
Nutrition: Raquel Rubio, Anna Jofré, Belén Martín, Teresa Aymerich and Margarita Garriga, for their study titled “Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages.”