WEBVTT

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
George and Charlotte Blonsky, who were

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
a married couple living in
the Brox in New York City,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
invented something.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They got a patent in 1965,
for what the call,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
"a device to assist women in giving birth."

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
This device consists of a large, round table


99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and some machinery.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
When the women is ready to deliver her child,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
she lies on her back,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
she is strapped down to the table,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and the table is rotated at high speed.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The child comes flying out

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
through centrifugal force.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
If you look at their patent carefully,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
especially if you have any engineering 
background or talent,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
You may decide that you see

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
one or two points where the design 
is not perfectly adequate.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Doctor Ivan Schwab in California

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is one of the people, 
one of the main people

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
who helped answer the question,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
"Why don't woodpeckers get headaches?"

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And it turns out the answer to that

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is because their brains

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
are packaged inside their skulls

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
in a way different from the way

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
our brains, we being human beings,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
true, have our brains packaged.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They, the woodpeckers, typically

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
will peck, they will bang their head

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
on a piece of wood thousands 
of times everyday.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Everyday.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And as far as anyone knows,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that doesn't bother them in the slightest.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
How does this happen?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Their brain does not slosh around like ours does.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Their brain is packed in very tightly,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
at least for blows coming 
right from the front.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Not too many people paid attention

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to this research until
the last few years

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
when, in this country especially,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
people are becoming curious about

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
what happens to the brains
of football players

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
who bang their heads repeatedly?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And the woodpecker maybe relates to that.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
There was a paper published

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
in the medical journal The Lancet

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
in England a few years ago called

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
" A man who proceed his finger
and smelled putrid for 5 years."

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Dr. Caroline Mills and her team

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
received this patient and 
didn't really know what

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to do about it.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The man had cut his finger,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
he worked processing chickens,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and then he started to
smell really, really bad

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So bad that when he 
got in a room

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
with the doctors and the nurses,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
they couldn't stand being 
in the room with him.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It was intolerable.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They tried every drug,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
every other treatment
they could think of.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
After a year, he still 
smelled putrid.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
After two years, still smelled putrid.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Three years, four years
still smelled putrid.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
After five years, it went away on its own.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It's a mystery.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
In New Zealand, Dr. Leann Parkin

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and her team tested an old 
tradition in her city.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They live in a city that has huge hills.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
San Francisco-grade hills.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And in the winter there,
it gets very cold

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and very icy.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
There are lots of injuries.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The tradition that they tested,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
they tested by asking people

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
who were on their way to 
work in the morning,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to stop and try something out.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Try one of two conditions.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The tradition is that in the winter,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
in that city, you wear your socks
on the outside of your boots.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And what they discovered by experiment,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and it was quite graphic when they saw it,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
was that it's true.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
That if you wear socks on the outside
rather than the inside,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you're much more likely 
to survive and not slip and fall.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Now, I hope you will agree
with me that these things

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I've just described to you,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
each of them, deserves some kind of prize.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And that's what they got,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
each of them got an Ig Nobel Prize.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
In 1991, I, together with bunch of other people,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
started the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Every year we give out 10 prizes.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The prizes are based on just one criteria.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
One criteria, it's very simple. It's that
you've done something that

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
makes people laugh and then think. 
What you've done makes people

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
laugh and then think.
Whatever it is,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
there's something about it
that when people encounter it at first,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
their only possible reaction is to laugh.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And then a week later,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it's still rattling around in their heads

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and all they want to do 
is tell their friends about it.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
That's the quality we look for.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Every year, we get in the neighborhood

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
of 9,000 new nominations 
for the Ig Nobel Prize.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Of those, consistently between 10 percent

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and 20 percent of those nominations

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
are people who nominate themselves.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Those self-nominees almost never win.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It's very difficult, numerically, 
to win a prize if you want to.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Even if you don't want to,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it's very difficult numerically.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
You should know that when 
we choose somebody

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to win an Ig Nobel Prize,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
We get in touch with that person,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
very quietly, we offer them 
the chance to decline

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
this great honor if they want to.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Happily for us, almost everyone 
who's accepted a prize

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
decides to accept.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
What do you get if you
win an Ig Nobel Prize?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Well, you get several things.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
You get an Ig Nobel Prize.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The design is different every year.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
These are always handmade
from extremely cheap materials.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
You're looking at a picture

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
of a prize we gave last year, 2013.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Most prizes in the world also give

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
their winners some cash, some money.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
We don't have any money,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
so we can't give them...

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
in fact, the winners have to
pay their own way

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to come to the Ig Nobel ceremony.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Which most of them do.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Last year, though, we did manage
to scrap up some money.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Last year, each of the 10
Ig Nobel Prize winners

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
received, from us, 10 trillion dollars.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
A 10 trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
You may remember that Zimbabwe 
had a little adventure

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
for a few years there of inflation.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They ended up printing bills

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that were in denominations as
large as 100 trillion dollars.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The man responsible, who runs
the national bank there, by the way,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
won an Ig Nobel Prize in mathematics.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The other thing you win is an invitation

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to come to the ceremony,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
which happens at Harvard University.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And when you get there,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you come to Harvard's biggest 
meeting place and classroom.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It fits 1,100 people,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it's jammed to the gills,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and up on the stage,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
waiting to shake your hand,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
waiting to hand you your Ig Nobel Prize,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
are a bunch of Nobel Prize winners.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
That's the heart of the ceremony.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The winners are kept secret until that moment,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
even the Nobel laureates who
will shake their hand

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
don't know who they are
until they're announced.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I am going to tell you about 
just a very few

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
of the other medical related 
prizes we've given.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Keep in mind, we've given 230 prizes. 


99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They're lots of these people
who walk among you.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Maybe you have one.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
A paper was published about 30 years ago

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
called "Injuries due to Falling Coconuts."

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It was written by doctor Peter Barss,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
who is Canadian.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Dr. Barrs came to the ceremony

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and explained that as a young doctor,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
he wanted to see the world.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So he went to Papua New Guinea.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
When he got there, he went to work
in a hospital, and he was curious,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
what kinds of things happen to people
that bring them to the hospital?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
He looked through the records,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and he discovered that surprisingly 
large number of people

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
in that hospital were there

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because of injuries due to falling coconuts.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
One typical thing that happens is

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
people will come from the highlands
where there are not many coconut trees,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to visit their relatives on the coast

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
where there are lots.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And they'll think that a coconut tree

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is a fine place to stand and maybe lie down.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
A coconut tree that is 90-feet-tall,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and has coconuts that weigh two pounds

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that can drop off at any time.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
A team of doctors in Europe

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
published a series of papers
about colonoscopies.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
You're all families with colonoscopies,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
one way or another.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Or in some cases,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
one way and another.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They, in these papers,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
explain to their fellow doctors
who perform colonoscopies,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
how to minimize the chance

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that when you perform a colonoscopy,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
your patient will explode.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Dr. Emmanuel Bensoussan

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
one of the authors,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
flew in from Paris to the ceremony,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
where he explained the history of this,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that in the 1950s,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
when colonoscopies were becoming
a common technique for the first time,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
people were figuring out how to do it well.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And there were some difficulties at first.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The basic problem, I'm sure you're familiar with,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is you're looking inside a 
long, narrow, dark place.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So, you want to have a larger space.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
You add some gas to inflate it

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
so you have room to look around.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Now that's added to the 
gas, the methane gas,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that's already inside.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The gas that they used at first
in many cases was oxygen.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So they added oxygen to methane gas

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and then they wanted to be able to see,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
they needed light,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
so they'd put in a light source,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
which in the 1950s was very hot.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So you had methane gas, which is flammable,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
oxygen and heat.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They stopped using oxygen pretty quickly.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Now, it's rare that patients will explode,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but it does still happen.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The final thing that I want to
tell you about it is a prize

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
we gave to Dr. Elena Bodnar.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Dr. Elena Bodnar invented a braissiere

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that in an emergency,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
can be quickly separated 


99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
into a pair of protective face masks.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
One to save your life,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
one to save the life
of some lucky bystander.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
"Why would someone do this?", you might wonder.


99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Dr. Bodnar came to the ceremony

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and she explained that she 
grew up in Ukraine,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
she was one of the doctors who treated victims

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
of the Chernobyl power plant meltdown.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And they later discovered that

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
a lot of the worst medical problems

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
came from the particles people breathed in.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So she was always thinking after that

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
about could there be some simple mask


99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that was available everywhere
when the unexpected happens?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Years later, she moved to America,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
she had a baby,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
One day she looked, and on the floor,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
her infant son had picked up her bra,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and had her bra on his face

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and that's where the idea came from.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
She came to the Ig Nobel ceremony

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
with the first prototype of the bra

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and she demonstrated:

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter and Applause)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I myself own an emergency bra.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It's my favorite bra,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but I would be happy to 
share it with any of you,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
should the need arise.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Thank you.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Applause)