Slime Mold and Investment Bankers

1 October 2010



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IgŪNobel Prizes for 2010 Awarded

Improbable Research hosted the 20th First Annual IgŪNobel Prize ceremony at the Sanders Theatre, Harvard University last night. For those unfamiliar with the IgŪNobels, they acknowledge "research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK," but does not worry greatly about needless capitalization. The IR website stated, "Every year, in a gala ceremony in Harvard's Sanders Theatre, 1200 splendidly eccentric spectators watch the winners step forward to accept their Prizes. These are physically handed out by genuinely bemused genuine Nobel laureates." This year, the best prizes involved slime mold and investment bankers, which really is redundant.

The prize for engineering was the most disgusting. A remote controlled helicopter was used to take breath samples from surfaced whales. By a happy coincidence, the samples contained sufficient mucus to allow researchers to obtain a sampling of the bacterial community living in the cetacean respiratory tract. All three women, Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, were present to collect their whale snot award.

A close second in the gross-out category took home the Public Health Prize. Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety Office, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, determined by experiment that microbes cling to bearded scientists.

Other awards worthy of mention include: the Biology Prize based on the publication of an article titled, "Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time;" the Physics Prize for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes; and the Peace Price belonging to Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.

This journal's favorite award, however, was almost a draw this year. On the one hand, one cannot help but admire the creativity behind the Transportation Planning Prize, which went to Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks. They laid out food in the pattern of the Tokyo subway, and slime mold efficiently gathered it up, illustrating how the tracks should run.

On the other hand, the Economics Prize was a truly inspired decision. IR awarded it to "The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money -- ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof."

In the end, top accolades go to the transportation team because they turned up while the recipients of the economics team did not. And also, one prefers slime mold to investment bankers.

Đ Copyright 2010 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.

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