Coke as spermicide, placebo prices and the ovulation cycles of strippers were just some of the winners at the 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony
Laugh first, think later. That’s the theory behind the annual Ig Nobel Awards, which celebrate academia’s most bizarre, irrelevant studies. Past winners have included Dan Quayle, doctors who found that Viagra helps jet-lagged hamsters, and two researchers who proved that sword-swallowing is dangerous. This year’s feature ovulating strippers, intelligent slime and soft drinks that double as spermicide.
Having trouble reconciling your love of IKEA furniture with your nostalgia for futuristic, self-reassembling T-1000-like robots? Well, don't fret. Your problem has been solved by a team of engineers and artists at Cornell University who have created the Robotic Chair, a deceptively simple-looking wooden chair that collapses into several pieces and then proceeds to put itself back together.
Described as "the culmination of a 20-year-long investigation into the engagement between the individual and the object," the Robotic Chair is a fine example of computer-assisted robot autonomy. After the chair collapses, the images from a camera mounted above the chair's platform are digitized by a computer with software that converts the location of the chair's pieces from the video into points on a grid. This information is then transmitted wirelessly to the processing unit in the chair's seat, which uses 14 motors and an array of sensors to find its pieces in the correct order and reassemble itself.
This isn't the first time the Cornell folks have dabbled in robotic furniture. Their previous piece, the Table: Childhood, was a table with a brain. The Table, fully mobile thanks to a mechanical set of wheels, could express emotions and even display preferences toward an individual in the room by either following or avoiding a person. Perhaps one day the Table or the Robotic Chair will be honored to join the ranks of the Ig Nobels along with a previous winner, an alarm clock that runs away from you when you try to turn it off.
Whether you appreciate the chair for its artistic value or the engineering skill that went into its creation, or file it away with the rest of the YouTube videos you've been forwarded, just be thankful it was created by people calling themselves the D'Andrea Group and not an organization as ominous or clearly evil as Cyberdyne. —Dan Smith
As my colleague has pointed out below, this week off in some place called Sweden, five prizes are being given out to a bunch of stuffy scientists, writers and peacemakers. And what do the winners receive? A hefty check for $1.4 million, a diploma and a shiny medal that is awarded to them by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. Boring.
Who cares about those prizes, when a much more important awards ceremony is set to take place tonight? The Ig Nobels, the bastard child of the Nobel Prizes, are awards presented to scientists for research that cannot or should not be reproduced. The raucous event is a chance for real Nobel laureates to throw paper airplanes as well as to recognize the work of cohorts in poorly publicized fields of research. Last years winners include researchers who studied the brain patterns of locusts forced to watch Star Wars and the guy who made Neuticles, replacement testicles for neutered dogs.
If youre in the greater Boston area, you may still be able to get tickets for tonights 7:30 ceremony. For the rest of us, a live webcast is offered at the official Ig Nobel site. It promises to be a truly inspiring and magical evening. —Dan Smith
In our December issue, Popular Science names the 100 best innovations of the year: bombproof wallpaper, self-parking cars, the fastest helicopter, and 97 more. Plus inventor profiles and videos.
