Gas Mask Bra Among Ig Nobel Prize Winners

It's time for the 2009 Ig Nobel prizes, those given out by Improbable Research annually to those achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think." The award-winners are always unusual, generally humorous, but always different.

This year, the most uplifting winner has to be the gas mask bra. Yes, it's a bra that can be quickly (hopefully, quickly enough) converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the bra-wearer and one for some needy bystander. Elena Bodnar of Hinsdale, Illinois and her colleagues won the Public Health prize for their design, which is patented (U.S. patent #7255627), by the way.

Bodnar is originally from the Ukraine, and witnessed some of the horrors of Chernobyl, and noted during the awards ceremony that her invention could have prevented people from breathing in Iodine-131 in the wake of Chernobyl.

Other interesting winners included:

• Pathologist Stephan Bolliger and colleagues at the University of Bern in Switzerland for a study they did to determine whether an empty beer bottle does more or less damage to the human skull than a full one in a bar fight. They both apparently are great at cracking open skulls, but empty ones are sturdier, because the pressure of carbonation, as well as the beer, makes a full beer bottle explode.

• Peter Rowlinson and Catherine Douglas of the University of Newcastle found that dairy cows who are given names yield more milk than unnamed cows. In reality, that was just part of the research, which showed that when humans show affection to animals, the animals return it.

• Ireland's police won the literature prize. This was due to them writing more than 50 traffic tickets to a Polish serial traffic offender named Prawo Jazdy. Prawo Jazdy is Polish for "Driver's License."

Here's the full list of Ig Nobel winners for 2009. They were awarded on Thursday at Harvard University by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine.

VETERINARY MEDICINE: the aforementioned cow study.

PEACE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl for the aforemention beer bottle study.

ECONOMICS: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks — Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland — for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.

CHEMISTRY: Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor Castano for creating diamonds out of tequila.

MEDICINE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand --- only ---- every day for more than sixty years.

PHYSICS: Katherine Whitcome, Liza Shapiro and Daniel Lieberman for analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over.

LITERATURE: The Irish police, as noted above

PUBLIC HEALTH: Elena Bodnar, Raphael Lee and Sandra Marijan for the aforementioned gas mask bra.

MATHEMATICS: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).

BIOLOGY: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu and Zhang Guanglei for demonstrating that bacteria in panda feces can help reduce kitchen waste by 90 percent.