19 October, 2001

Every year the Nobel prizes are awarded to people who have made great achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine and many other fields. A Nobel Prize is perhaps the greatest award a scientist can receive. This year, Nobel Prizes were awarded in Physics to Eric A. Cornell and Carl E. Wieman of the United States and Wolfgang Ketterle of Germany for creating a Bose-Einstein condensate (a very cold form of matter with special properties). The prize for chemistry went to William S. Knowles and K. Barry Sharpless of the United States and Ryoji Noyori of Japan for their work on chiral molecules (molecules that contain the same atoms, but are mirror images of each other).

Then there are the Ig Nobel prizes.

According to their web site "The Ig Nobel Prizes honor people whose achievements 'cannot or should not be reproduced.' Ten prizes are given to people who have done remarkably goofy things -- some of them admirable, some perhaps otherwise." In other words, they are awards for bad science, silly science, ridiculous science and just plain stupid science. An Ig Nobel prize is definitely not the greatest award a scientist can receive.

This year's winners of the Ig Nobel prizes were announced on 5 October 2001. Among the winners were:

• MEDICINE: Peter Barss of McGill University for a report on "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts."
• PHYSICS: David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts for investigating why shower curtains billow inwards (more about this next week).
• BIOLOGY: Buck Weimer of Pueblo, Colorado for inventing Under-Ease, underwear with a built-in fart filter.
• PUBLIC HEALTH: Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, for their discovery that nose picking is a common activity among teenagers.

There was one Australian winner, in Technology. A patent is a legal document saying that a person has invented something. To show how silly some recent Australian laws on patents are, John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria applied for a patent on the wheel. The Australian Patent Office gave him one. They shared a joint award.

If you would like to know more, you can visit www.improb.com/ig/ig-top.html.
If you would like to find out more about the actual Nobel prizes, their web site is at www.nobel.se.

Activity: Spraying Straws
This is a simple experiment to demonstrate a few principals of air pressure.

For this experiment you will need a glass of water, a straw and a pair of scissors. It's easier if you have a short glass instead of a tall one.

We will be spraying a bit of water around, so try this experiment outside.

Place the straw into the glass. Cut the top of the straw off between about one-half and one centimetre above the lip of the glass. Now put the top piece of straw in your mouth and hold it so the top of the straw in the glass blocks off about half the end of the straw in your mouth. Now blow hard.

You should find the water rises up the straw until it gets to the top. Then it sprays out in front of you.

This works because of air pressure. Moving air has a lower pressure than the air around it. When you are not blowing, air pressure pushes down on the water in the glass. It pushes down evenly, even on the bit of water in the straw. When you start blowing, the air pressure at the top of the straw drops. The difference in pressure sucks the water up the straw, just like when you suck on a straw. Once it gets to the top, the force of the air blasts it out the front.

My father uses this effect a lot. He's a woodworker. When he makes things in his workshop he has to spray them with lacquer (a clear coating that goes on like paint). He uses a paint sprayer that connects to an air compressor. A container of lacquer attaches to the sprayer and has a metal tube hanging down into it. When he pulls a trigger, compressed air blasts over the top of the tube, sucks the lacquer up and sprays it out in a fine mist, just like you did with the straws. Some perfume bottles work the same way.

If you really want to make a mess, try a vacuum cleaner in blowing mode over a thin, tall container of rice bubbles. Definitely do this with parents' permission and do it outside.