So it is true... a shock really will stop the hiccups
Our correspondent reports on the prizes most scientists do their best to avoid

WHEN a young man walked into the accident and emergency department of Univer- sity Hospital in Jacksonville, Tennessee, complaining of hiccups that had lasted three days, Francis Fesmire, who treated him, had little idea he was about to make medical history.
Yesterday, the American doctor’s innovative solution to the problem — an uncomfortable one that you might not wish to try at home — received the honour it deserves, an Ig Nobel Prize for research that “cannot or should not be reproduced”.

After trying a variety of standard hiccup cures, such as pulling the patient’s tongue and making him gag, Dr Fesmire decided on a different approach.

“Digital rectal massage was then attempted using a slow circumferential motion,” he wrote in his seminal case report, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. “The frequency of hiccups immediately began to slow, with a termination of all hiccups within 30 seconds.”
Dr Fesmire’s unconventional therapy has since been replicated, by Majed Odeh of Zion Medical Centre in Haifa, Israel, with whom he shared the Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine, in Harvard University’s annual spoof of the real Nobel awards.

The honour is given to science that “first makes people laugh and then makes them think”, and the prizes were handed out last night by seven genuine Nobel laureates.

Marc Abrahams, who organises the Ig Nobels, said: “Quite why Dr Fesmire decided to try this in the first place, I am not sure. But that is why he is a pioneer of medical science, and I am not.”

Other scientists to find their way on to this year’s roll of dishonour included Ivan Schwab, of the University of California, Davis, who won the Ornitho- logy award for solving the thorny problem of why woodpeckers do not get headaches.

The pileated woodpecker engages in repetetive head-banging for much of the day, of an intensity that would leave human beings with serious brain and eye injuries. It survives unscathed because of adaptations in the anatomy of its skull that offer protection.
The Mathematics prize went to Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes, of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation, for calculating how many group photographs must be taken to ensure nobody spoils one by blinking.

The solution: divide the number of people in the picture by three in good light, and two in bad, and if there are more than fifty people in the picture, give up.

British science was represented by Howard Stapleton, from Merthyr Tydfil, who won the Peace prize for inventing both the “teenager repellent” and the mobile phone ringtone that teachers cannot hear.

Both technologies rely on the ability to hear very high frequencies being lost in the late teens: loud blasts of noise in this register are thus irritating to adolescents but not to adults, but they can also hear high-pitched ringtones that their elders cannot.

Daniel Oppenheimer, of Princeton University, won the Literature award for a series of experiments showing that deliberately using long words is a lousy way of impressing people: it actually makes you look stupid.

The Nutrition award was won by two Kuwaiti scientists for determining that dung beetles prefer the faeces of horses and dogs to those of camels and foxes.

A French team won the Physics prize for determining why dried spaghetti never breaks into only two pieces when snapped.

All the winners were given 60 seconds to explain their work, and will have slightly longer tomorrow, when they are invited to give public lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr Abrahams rounded off the ceremony with a salutation that has now become tradi- tional: “If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel prize tonight — and especially if you did — better luck next year.”

Author Mark Henderson
Publication Times Online
Date 06 October 2006
Link www.timesonline.co.uk