-
George and Charlotte Blonsky, who were
-
a married couple living in
the Brox in New York City,
-
invented something.
-
They got a patent in
1965 for what they call,
-
"a device to assist women in giving birth."
-
This device consists of a large, round table
-
and some machinery.
-
When the woman is ready to deliver her child,
-
she lies on her back,
-
she is strapped down to the table,
-
and the table is rotated at high speed.
-
The child comes flying out
-
through centrifugal force.
-
If you look at their patent carefully,
-
especially if you have any
engineering background or talent,
-
you may decide that you see
-
one or two points where the
design is not perfectly adequate.
-
Doctor Ivan Schwab in California
-
is one of the people,
one of the main people,
-
who helped answer the question,
-
"Why don't Woodpeckers get headaches?"
-
And it turns out the answer to that
-
is because their brains
-
are packaged inside their skulls
-
in a way different from the way
-
our brains, we being human beings,
-
true, have our brains packaged.
-
They, the Woodpeckers, typically
-
will peck, they will bang their head
-
on a piece of wood thousands
of times everyday.
-
Everyday.
-
And as far as anyone knows,
-
that doesn't bother them in the slightest.
-
How does this happen?
-
Their brain does not slosh around like ours does.
-
Their brain is packed in very tightly,
-
at least for blows coming
right from the front.
-
Not too many people paid attention
-
to this research until
the last few years
-
when, in this country especially,
-
people are becoming curious about
-
what happens to the brains
of football players
-
who bang their heads repeatedly.
-
And the Woodpecker maybe relates to that.
-
There was a paper published
-
in the medical journal "The Lancet"
-
in England a few years ago called
-
" A man who proceed his finger
and smelled putrid for 5 years."
-
Dr. Caroline Mills and her team
-
received this patient and
didn't really know what
-
to do about it.
-
The man had cut his finger,
-
he worked processing chickens,
-
and then he started to
smell really, really bad.
-
So bad that when
he got in a room
-
with the doctors and the nurses,
-
they couldn't stand being
in the room with him.
-
It was intolerable.
-
They tried every drug,
-
every other treatment
they could think of.
-
After a year, he still
smelled putrid.
-
After two years, still smelled putrid.
-
Three years, four years,
still smelled putrid.
-
After five years, it went away on its own.
-
It's a mystery.
-
In New Zealand, Dr. Leann Parkin
-
and her team tested an old
tradition in her city.
-
They live in a city that has huge hills,
-
San Francisco-grade hills.
-
And in the winter there,
it gets very cold
-
and very icy.
-
There are lots of injuries.
-
The tradition that they tested,
-
they tested by asking people
-
who were on their way to
work in the morning,
-
to stop and try something out.
-
Try one of two conditions.
-
The tradition is that in the winter,
-
in that city, you wear your socks
on the outside of your boots.
-
And what they discovered by experiment,
-
and it was quite graphic when they saw it,
-
was that it's true.
-
That if you wear socks on the outside
rather than the inside,
-
you're much more likely
to survive and not slip and fall.
-
Now, I hope you will agree
with me that these things
-
I've just described to you,
-
each of them, deserves some kind of prize.
-
And that's what they got,
-
each of them got an Ig Nobel Prize.
-
In 1991, I, together with bunch of other people,
-
started the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.
-
Every year we give out 10 prizes.
-
The prizes are based on just one criteria.
Just one criteria, it's very simple.
-
It's that you've done something that
makes people laugh and then think.
-
What you've done makes
people laugh and then think.
-
Whatever it is, there's something about it
-
that when people encounter it at first,
-
their only possible reaction is to laugh.
-
And then a week later,
-
it's still rattling around in their heads
-
and all they want to do
is tell their friends about it.
-
That's the quality we look for.
-
Every year, we get in the neighborhood
-
of 9,000 new nominations
for the Ig Nobel Prize.
-
Of those, consistently between 10 percent
-
and 20 percent of those nominations
-
are people who nominate themselves.
-
Those self-nominees almost never win.
-
It's very difficult, numerically,
to win a prize if you want to.
-
Even if you don't want to,
-
it's very difficult numerically.
-
You should know that when
we choose somebody
-
to win an Ig Nobel Prize,
-
We get in touch with that person, very quietly.
-
We offer them the chance to decline
-
this great honor if they want to.
-
Happily for us, almost everyone
who's accepted a prize
-
decides to accept.
-
What do you get if you
win an Ig Nobel Prize?
-
Well, you get several things.
-
You get an Ig Nobel Prize.
-
The design is different every year.
-
These are always handmade
from extremely cheap materials.
-
You're looking at a picture
-
of the prize we gave last year, 2013.
-
Most prizes in the world also give
-
their winners some cash, some money.
-
We don't have any money,
-
so we can't give them...
-
in fact, the winners have to
pay their own way
-
to come to the Ig Nobel ceremony,
-
which most of them do.
-
Last year, though, we did manage
to scrap up some money.
-
Last year, each of the 10
Ig Nobel Prize winners
-
received, from us, 10 trillion dollars.
-
A 10 trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe.
-
You may remember that
Zimbabwe had a little adventure
-
for a few years there of inflation.
-
They ended up printing bills
-
that were in denominations as
large as 100 trillion dollars.
-
The man responsible, who runs
the national bank there, by the way,
-
won an Ig Nobel Prize in mathematics.
-
The other thing you win is an invitation
-
to come to the ceremony,
-
which happens at Harvard University.
-
And when you get there,
-
you come to Harvard's biggest
meeting place and classroom.
-
It fits 1,100 people,
-
it's jammed to the gills,
-
and up on the stage,
-
waiting to shake your hand,
-
waiting to hand you your Ig Nobel Prize,
-
are a bunch of Nobel Prize winners.
-
That's the heart of the ceremony.
-
The winners are kept secret until that moment,
-
even the Nobel laureates
who will shake their hand
-
don't know who they are
until they're announced.
-
I am going to tell you
about just a very few
-
of the other medical related prizes we've given.
-
Keep in mind, we've given 230 prizes.
-
They're lots of these people
who walk among you.
-
Maybe you have one.
-
A paper was published about 30 years ago
-
called "Injuries due to Falling Coconuts."
-
It was written by doctor Peter Barss,
-
who is Canadian.
-
Dr. Barrs came to the ceremony
-
and explained that as a young doctor,
-
he wanted to see the world.
-
So he went to Papua New Guinea.
-
When he got there, he went to work
in a hospital, and he was curious,
-
what kinds of things happen to people
that bring them to the hospital.
-
He looked through the records, and he discovered
-
that a surprisingly large number of people
-
in that hospital were there
-
because of injuries due to falling coconuts.
-
One typical thing that happens is
-
people will come from the highlands,
where there are not many coconut trees,
-
down to visit their relatives on the coast,
-
where there are lots.
-
And they'll think that a coconut tree
-
is a fine place to stand and maybe lie down.
-
A coconut tree that is 90-feet-tall,
-
and has coconuts that weigh two pounds
-
that can drop off at any time.
-
A team of doctors in Europe
-
published a series of papers
about colonoscopies.
-
You're all familiar with colonoscopies,
-
one way or another.
-
Or in some cases,
-
one way and another.
-
They, in these papers,
-
explained to their fellow doctors
who perform colonoscopies,
-
how to minimize the chance
-
that when you perform a colonoscopy,
-
your patient will explode.
-
Dr. Emmanuel Bensoussan
-
one of the authors,
-
flew in from Paris to the ceremony,
-
where he explained the history of this,
-
that in the 1950s,
-
when colonoscopies were becoming
a common technique for the first time,
-
people were figuring out how to do it well.
-
And there were some difficulties at first.
-
The basic problem, I'm sure you're familiar with,
-
that you're looking inside a
long, narrow, dark place.
-
And so, you want to have a larger space.
-
You add some gas to inflate it
-
so you have room to look around.
-
Now, that's added to the
gas, the methane gas,
-
that's already inside.
-
The gas that they used at first,
in many cases, was oxygen.
-
So they added oxygen to methane gas.
-
And then they wanted to be able to see,
-
they needed light,
-
so they'd put in a light source,
-
which in the 1950s was very hot.
-
So you had methane gas, which is flammable,
-
oxygen and heat.
-
They stopped using oxygen pretty quickly.
-
Now, it's rare that patients will explode,
-
but it does still happen.
-
The final thing that I want to
tell you about it is a prize
-
we gave to Dr. Elena Bodnar.
-
Dr. Elena Bodnar invented a brassiere
-
that in an emergency,
-
can be quickly separated
-
into a pair of protective face masks.
-
One to save your life,
-
one to save the life of
some lucky bystander.
-
"Why would someone do this?", you might wonder.
-
Dr. Bodnar came to the ceremony
-
and she explained that
she grew up in Ukraine.
-
She was one of the doctors who treated victims
-
of the Chernobyl power plant meltdown.
-
And they later discovered that
-
a lot of the worst medical problems
-
came from the particles people breathed in.
-
So she was always thinking after that
-
about could there be some simple mask
-
that was available everywhere
when the unexpected happens.
-
Years later, she moved to America.
-
She had a baby,
-
One day she looked, and on the floor,
-
her infant son had picked up her bra,
-
and had her bra on his face.
-
And that's where the idea came from.
-
She came to the Ig Nobel ceremony
-
with the first prototype of the bra
-
and she demonstrated:
-
(Laughter and Applause)
-
I myself own an emergency bra.
-
It's my favorite bra,
-
but I would be happy to
share it with any of you,
-
should the need arise.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)