There comes a time in a scientist’s life when the surest route to global fame involves a bevy of naked French postmen with thermometers taped to their testicles.
At least that is the case for Roger Mieusset, a fertility specialist at the University of Toulouse, whose unlikely studies have earned him one of the most coveted awards in academia — an Ig Nobel.
Unlike the more famous — and rather more prestigious — Nobel prizes, which are to be announced in Scandinavia next month, the Ig Nobels honor work that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think.”
Photo: AP
Ten awards were handed out on Thursday at the annual ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where an eight-year-old girl was on duty to enforce the one-minute rule on winners’ speeches with the devastating line: “Please stop, I’m bored.”
Now in their 29th year, the awards included a chemistry prize for Japanese scientists who calculated how much saliva a typical five-year-old produces in one day (half a liter); an engineering prize for an Iranian inventor’s nappy-changing machine; and an economics prize for Dutch researchers who discovered that banknotes can spread infectious microbes, and none more so than the Romanian leu.
Italian scientists won the medicine prize for pursuing the idea that pizzas offer protection against death, a question they never quite managed to answer.
Mieusset and his accomplice, Bourras Bengoudifa, recruited French postmen to settle a mystery that has received precious little attention: whether a man’s testicles are both the same temperature.
Having crunched the numbers sent from delicately placed sensors, Mieusset only deepened the mystery.
According to his studies, the left one is warmer, but only when a man has his clothes on.
Mieusset has invented heated pants for men to wear as an aid to contraception — he appears to be the sole purveyor of the unorthodox intervention.
Francis McGlone, a researcher at Liverpool John Moores University, shared the Ig Nobel peace prize as part of an international team that helped map out which parts of the body are most pleasurable to scratch.
The ankles ranked highest, the researchers found, and then the back and forearm.
“I was over the moon when I heard. It’s nice for all of us. It’s an honor,” McGlone said on hearing he had won. “The thing that’s fascinated me for a long while now is why is scratching an itch so bloody nice?”
However, there was a serious side to the research, he said.
“People always laugh about itching, but chronic itch is devastating. People with chronic itch will scratch until it bleeds because the pain is preferable to the itching,” he said.
By understanding which parts of the body are most prone to itch, and those which are most susceptible to relief, scientists hope to find new treatments for the condition.
McGlone, who could not attend the ceremony, accepted the award in a video message recorded with a homunculus on his shoulder.
As is standard for the annual event, winners pay their own way to Harvard, where the prizes are handed out by Nobel laureates.
The winners each receive a cash prize — an obsolete Zimbabwean 10 trillion dollar bill.
Patricia Yang and David Hu, both engineers at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, celebrated their second Ig Nobel prize at the ceremony.
The researchers bagged their first in 2015 for discovering the “law of urination,” which states that all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds.
This year, as part of a larger team, the two shared the physics prize for working out how wombats make cube-shaped feces.
The feat, thought to be unique in the animal world, helps them construct stable piles of dung to mark their territory.
Contacted about the prize, Yang said: “It solidifies my belief that curiosity brings joy and surprise in science.”
Other awards included the biology prize for a Chinese-led team that found that dead, magnetized cockroaches behave differently to living, magnetized cockroaches when studied with a quantum sensor; and the medical education prize went to a US group that showed that acoustic clickers used in dog training also boost the skills of surgical students.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not