Boffins cure blinking photos
AN Australian team has won an IgNobel award, the science fraternity's alternative counterpart to the far more serious Nobel prizes, which were also held this week.

Alongside research into stinky feet, a study on the sound of fingernails on a blackboard and a device that repels teenagers with an annoying high-pitched hum, the CSIRO team of Nic Svenson and Dr Piers Barnes won a mathematics prize with a solution to the perennial problem of blinking subjects in group shots.

"We are proud to have made a gross simplification of complex physiological and psychological factors backed up with no empirical data,” scientist Dr Barnes said.

Like many other theories, if enough assumptions are made, we are confident that our expression holds," he said.

Dr Barnes explanied how the the formula works: for groups of less than 20, you divide the number of people by three if there’s good light or a decent flash, and two if the light's bad.

Other winning research included a US and Israeli team's discovery that hiccups could be cured with a finger up the rectum and a study into why woodpeckers do not get headaches.

"The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative – and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology," said Marc Abrahams, editor of the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research, which sponsors the awards with the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.

All the research is real and has been published in often-prestigious scientific and medical journals. However, unlike the Nobel prizes awarded this week by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, IgNobel winners receive no money, little recognition and have virtually no hope of transforming science or medicine.

Even the name of the award, a play on the word "ignoble," is meant to be deprecating.

But they receive their awards from real Nobel winners in an event broadcast on the Internet at www.improbable.com on Thursday evening.

The 2006 IgNobel winners, by category were:

MATHEMATICS – Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation, for calculating the number of shots a photographer must take to almost ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed. Put simply, the CSIRO team worked out that the probability of one person spoiling a photo by blinking equals their expected number of blinks (x), multiplied by the time during which the photo could be spoilt (t) - if the expected time between blinks is longer than the time in which a photo can be spoilt, which it is.

BIOLOGY – Bart Knols of Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands, the National Institute for Medical Research in Tanzania and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria and colleague Ruurd de Jong for showing that the female Anopheles gambiae mosquito, which carries malaria, is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet. "We have shown that three different Anopheles mosquito species prefer to bite different parts of a naked motionless volunteer and that this behaviour is influenced by odours from those body regions," they wrote in their report, published in the Lancet medical journal in 1996.

ORNITHOLOGY – Ivan Schwab of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for explaining why woodpeckers do not get headaches.

NUTRITION – Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.

PEACE – Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing a teen-ager repellent – a device that makes a high-pitched noise that is annoying to teen-agers but inaudible to most adults; and for later using the technology to make cellphone ringtones that teenagers can hear but not their teachers.

ACOUSTICS – D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand of Chicago's Northwestern University for a 1986 experiment aimed at discovering why the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard is so irritating.

MEDICINE – Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine and the team of Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center in Haifa, Israel who both published studies entitled "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage."

Author Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor in Washington
Publication News.com.au
Date 06 October 2006
Link www.news.com.au