[Vision2020] DoD Gets Non-Prize for 'Gay Bomb'

[Tom Hansen]

>From the Army Times 

 

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DoD gets non-prize for 'gay bomb'

 

By Mark Pratt - The Associated Press

Posted : Friday Oct 5, 2007 17:45:10 EDT

   

BOSTON - Good news for your Viagra-using hamster: On his next trip to
Europe, he'll bounce back from jet lag faster than his unmedicated friends.

 

The researchers who revealed that bizarre fact earned one of 10 Ig Nobel
prizes awarded Thursday night for quirky, funny and sometimes legitimate
scientific achievements, from the mathematics of wrinkled sheets to U.S.
military efforts to make a "gay bomb."

 

The recipients of the annual award handed out by the Annals of Improbable
Research magazine were honored at Harvard University's Sanders Theater.

 

The Air Force won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize this year for its proposal to
develop a "gay bomb" - a chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers want
to make love with each other, not war with the enemy.

 

Abrahams talked to a number of retired and active Air Force personnel to try
and get someone to accept the prize in person on behalf of the military.
None would.

 

"Who in their right mind would turn something like this down?" said Cornell
University professor Brian Wansink.

 

A team at Quilmes National University in Buenos Aires, Argentina, came up
with the jet-lag study, which found that hamsters given the anti-impotence
drug needed 50 percent less time to recover from a six-hour time zone
change. They didn't fly the rodents to Paris, incidentally - they just
turned the lights off and on at different times.

 

Odd as it might be, that research might have implications for millions of
humans. The same cannot be said for another winning report, "Sword
Swallowing and its Side Effects," published in the British Medical Journal
last year.

 

It was the world's first comprehensive study of sword swallowing injuries,
said co-author Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tenn., one of only a few dozen active
sword swallowers in the world. Not surprisingly, throat abrasions,
perforated esophagi and punctured blood vessels were the most common
injuries.

 

"Most sword swallowing injuries happen either after another smaller injury
when the throat is tender and swollen, or while doing something out of the
ordinary, like swallowing multiple swords," said Meyer, who went a month
without solid food after doing the latter in 2005.

 

The Ig Nobel for nutrition went to a concept that sounds like a restaurant
marketing ploy: a bottomless bowl of soup.

 

Wansink used bowls rigged with tubes that slowly and imperceptibly refilled
them with creamy tomato soup to see if test subjects ate more than they
would with a regular bowl.

 

"We found that people eating from the refillable soup bowls ended up eating
73 percent more soup, but they never rated themselves as any more full,"
said Wansink, a professor of consumer behavior and applied economics. "They
thought, 'How can I be full when the bowl has so much left in it?'"

 

His conclusion: "We as Americans judge satiety with our eyes, not with our
stomachs."

 

Harvard professor of applied mathematics L. Mahadevan and professor Enrique
Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago in Chile won for their studies
on a problem that has vexed anyone who ever made up a bed: wrinkled sheets.

 

The wrinkle patterns seen on sheets are replicated in nature on human and
animal skin, in science and in technology.

 

"We showed that you can understand all of them using a very simple formula,"
Mahadevan said.

 

His research, he says, shows that "there's no reason good science can't be
fun."

 

Other winners include a Dutch researcher who conducted a census of all the
creepy-crawlies that share our beds, and a man who patented a Batman-like
device that drops a net over bank robbers. 

 

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"We're a town of about 23,000 with 10,000 college students. The college
students are not very active in local elections (thank goodness!)."

- Dale Courtney (March 28, 2007) 

 

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