Boston

This year's fourteenth Ig Nobel Prize ceremony clashed with the first debate of the US presidential election campaign. But there was no evidence of regret inside the packed auditorium at Harvard University, Massachusetts. For these fans of science that “makes you laugh, and then makes you think”, it was George W. Bush and John Kerry who were missing the show.

Presided over by the King and Queen of Swedish Meatballs, as usual, the 30 September event featured Nobel laureates Dudley Herschbach, William Lipscomb and Richard Roberts blowing bullhorns, hula-hooping and singing the classic You're Just Too Good To Be True with a karaoke machine.

Herschbach was the delectable prize on offer in the evening's contest to win a date with a Nobel laureate, and Roberts was called on to describe the concept of heredity in just seven words: “Heredity means blame your parents, not yourself,” he said.

The Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Steven Stack of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and James Gundlach of Auburn University, Alabama, for their paper, “The effect of country music on suicide” (Social Forces 71, 211–218; 1992). The physics prize was awarded to Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada, and Michael Turvey of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, for their sterling work on the dynamics of hula-hooping (Biol. Cybern. 90, 176–190; 2004) — it seems that to keep the plastic ring spinning around the waist, it is vital to move up and down at the knees.

The coveted public-health prize went to Jillian Clarke, a Chicago high-school graduate, for experiments that validated the ‘five-second rule’, which states that it is safe to eat food dropped on the floor if its stay there was sufficiently brief. And the peace prize went to Daisuke Inoue of Hyogo, Japan, the inventor of karaoke. “Let's party!” he urged the crowd.

Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University brought home the psychology prize for their report, “Gorillas in our midst”, which showed that when observers concentrate on one thing — in their study, people passing a basketball back and forth — they can completely overlook something else — such as a man appearing in a gorilla suit.

And the biology prize went to a collaboration from Canada, Denmark, Scotland and Sweden for demonstrating the role of flatulence in herring communications. Accepting his award, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University, Canada, summed up the evening: “It's been a gas,” he said.

→ http://www.improb.com/ig