Electronic teenager repellant and scraping fingernails, the sounds of Ig Nobel success
It's a device with a variety of practical applications; an ingenious gadget that disperses gangs of loitering teenagers by emitting a piercing shriek only they can hear. Not the pinnacle of science, perhaps, but high enough to win the Welsh engineer who designed it an award from Harvard.

Howard Stapleton today receives the 2006 Ig Nobel award for peace, joining a prestigious group of previous British winners of prizes that are becoming nearly as coveted their more high-minded Nobel cousins. The Ig Nobels celebrate the quirkier side of serious scientific endeavour, according to Marc Abrahams, the man behind them, honouring "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think".

For Mr Stapleton, of Compound Security Systems in Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales, the accolade came for his electronic teenager repellant, called the Mosquito.

The Mosquito exploits an ageing effect that sees our ability to hear high frequency sounds dwindle as we get older. In our teens, we can typically hear sounds ranging from 20Hz to 20kHZ, but with age, the highest frequencies we can hear drops, sometimes to 18kHz or less.

"We discovered that, even at relatively low volumes, the right frequency noise would only be heard by 25s and below and it was highly annoying after five minutes," Mr Stapleton said. "The Mosquito was born."

Tests of the £580 unit at a local Spar shop in Barry, south Wales, last year were declared a success when teenagers that congregated outside the premises pleaded with the owner, Robert Gough, to turn it off. Older customers were reported to be oblivious to the high-pitched shriek. The box, mounted on a wall outside the shop, was programmed to emit an 80-decibel pulse of high frequency sound that cleared an area up to 15 metres away.

A second Ig Nobel went to US scientists for their work on the mystery of why fingernails being dragged down a blackboard produces an excruciating sound. The team, which was led by D. Lynn Halpern at Northwestern University in Chicago, found the noise topped a list of annoying sounds and revealed that it remains deeply unpleasant even if the high-pitched squeals are digitally silenced.

The study, entitled Psychoacoustics of Chilling Sound, was published in the journal Perception and Psychophysics but failed to answer the pressing question of why the sound is so shudder-inducing: "Still unanswered, however, is the question of why this and related sounds are so grating to the ear," the authors wrote.

In all, 10 winners were honoured with awards, including Ivan Schwab of the University of California, Davis, who received the ornithology prize for his paper on how woodpeckers avoid headaches.

His research, published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, followed studies of head injuries in woodpeckers from the 1970s. The answer lies in how a woodpecker's skull and brain are arranged: the muscles around the sensitive brain tissues make the woodpecker's head function like a perfect shock absorber.

Dr Abrahams said it was classic Ig Nobel territory. "It epitomises what the Ig Nobels do every now and again - the moment they hear the question, they're happy that somebody has put the question into words and they're even happier that someone's begun to answer it," he said. "This prize will give new meaning to the old phrase, to rack your brains."

While this year's Nobel prize for physics went to two scientists who helped to prove that the universe began with a big bang, Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris won the Ig Nobel physics prize for tackling the conundrum of why dry spaghetti breaks into more than one piece when it is bent.

The prizes were handed to the winners by Nobel laureates Roy Glauber (Physics, 2005), Dudley Herschbach (Chemistry, 1986), William Lipscomb (Chemistry, 1976), Rich Roberts (Physiology or Medicine, 1993) and Frank Wilczek (Physics, 2004).

Each winner was allowed 60 seconds to deliver an acceptance speech and will try to explain themselves further at public lectures tomorrow afternoon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Last year, top billing went to the award for fluid dynamics, shared by Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of the International University Bremen and Jozsef Gal of Lorand Eotvos University in Hungary "for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin". Previous years have honoured a centrifugal-force birthing machine that spins pregnant women at high speed and Britain's official six-page specification for how to make a cup of tea.

Dr Abrahams said the awards, now in their 16th year, are becoming increasingly popular, with up to 7,000 new nominations every year. "Some of those nominees are really intent on getting an Ig Nobel prize for themselves," he said. "Not only are individuals nominating themselves, we see companies nominating their employees, universities nominating their faculty and, in a couple of cases, governments nominating ... people."

Last night's ceremony ended with the traditional call from Dr Abrahams to researchers everywhere: "If you didn't win an Ig Nobel prize tonight - and especially if you did - better luck next year."

Author Alok Jha
Publication The Guardian
Date 06 October 2006
Link www.guardian.co.uk