Gas mask bra among 2009 Ig Nobel Prize winners
A bra which turns into two working gas masks is among the achievements to be celebrated at the 19th annual Ig Nobel Prize awards ceremony. Other winners include Cow TLC, Tequila Diamonds, and Panda Poop. All of which may have some merit but can generally definitely be described as ignoble.
The Nobel Prize is a long-running and well-established ceremony which rewards those who have achieved great feats in the fields of science, literature, and economics. But since 1991 they have been preceded by the Ig Nobel Prize, a parody of the main awards, which endeavor to “first make people laugh, and then make them think.”
According to National Geographic, the ceremony is organized by the scientific humor magazine, the Annals of Improbable Research, and this year were held at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater.
The gas mask bra won the Ig Nobel in public health. Elena Bodnar and colleagues designed a fashionable bra that can be turned into a pair of HEPA-filter gas masks within a matter of seconds. Bodnar designed the gas mask bra after being moved by her experiences as a young Ukrainian medical student helping victims of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
She demonstrated the bra on members of the judging panel, including Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Wolfgang Ketterle. She said:
It only takes 25 seconds for any woman to use. Five seconds to convert and wear her own mask, and 20 seconds to wonder who the lucky man is to wear the second mask.
Other winners include:
Researchers from Newcastle University who showed that giving names to cows made the animals produce more milk than those who remain nameless. While Stephan Bolliger and colleagues from the University of Bern investigated how much damage a beer bottle can inflict during a bar brawl.
Miguel Apátiga and colleagues created diamonds from tequila. While Donald L. Unger of Thousand Oaks, California proved that cracking your knuckles does not cause arthritis. He did this by cracking the knuckles on one hand, and only one hand, every day for 60 years.
Last but not least, Fumiaki Taguchi, a microbiologist at Kitasato University’s graduate school of medicine in Japan, discovered how giant panda poop can be used to reduce kitchen waste. Apparently, their bamboo diet contains trash-devouring bacteria. So maybe there is a reason to stop giant pandas from dying out after all.
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January 3rd, 2011
Greetings, I just received a brand new HEPA purifier and it’s amazing.