World Toilet Summit: A Flush of Excitement
‘Gay bomb’ scoops Ig Nobel award
Pioneering research into a “gay bomb” that makes enemy troops “sexually irresistible” to each other has scooped one of this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes.
Other winners included work on treating hamster jetlag with impotency drugs, extracting vanilla from cow dung, and the side-effects of sword swallowing.
The awards, founded in 1991, mark achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think”.
The prize ceremony took place at Harvard University, US.
Genuine Nobel Laureates handed out the much-coveted awards to the winners, who took away no cash, but instead received a hand-made prize, a certificate, and, of course, the glory of such an illustrious win.
Sword effects
Dan Meyer, executive director of Sword Swallowing Association International and an author of the British Medical Journal paper Sword Swallowing and its Side-Effects, said: “I was surprised and extremely honoured when I found out I was not only nominated for an Ig Nobel prize but that I had won it. I couldn’t believe it.”
He told the BBC News website that the study revealed that when professional sword swallowers ingested a single sword very carefully, it did not do much harm, but swallowing many swords, strangely shaped blades, or being distracted when swallowing, could cause injury.
The findings also suggested that sword swallowers should not swallow swords if they already had a sore throat, he said.
Unfortunately, said the organisers, nobody from the US military who carried out the research on chemicals that could prompt homosexual dalliances amongst rival troops (a research project called Harassing, Annoying and “Bad Guy” Identifying Chemicals) attended the ceremony because the study’s authors could not be tracked down.
Real research
The Ig Nobel Prizes were created by the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), a science magazine.
Ig Nobel Prize
The Ig Nobels celebrate the unusual side of research
The awards, now in their 17th year, are intended to “celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative - and spur people’s interest in science, medicine and technology”.
Marc Abrahams, the editor of AIR, told the BBC News website: “When I became the editor of a science magazine, suddenly I was meeting all kinds of people who had done things that were hard to describe, and for the most part, nobody had ever heard of.
“For some of them, it seemed a great shame that nobody would give them any kind of recognition, and that was what really led to the birth of the Ig Nobels.”
Like their more sober counterpart, the Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobels are split into several categories and all research is real and published.
Late for Work; Caught with Pants Down
Sun Media: The London Free Press: The crackdown on speeders is only in its first week, but Lambton OPP have already caught one man with his pants down — literally.
A 25-year-old Wallaceburg man is charged with careless driving after he was stopped for speeding Wednesday night and was found with his pants around his ankles, police said.
His vehicle was heading west on Petrolia Line in St. Clair Township, going 37 kilometres an hour over the limit.
Police said the man told them he was trying to pull his pants on because he was running late for work.
Woman Told To Ditch Bra To Enter Court
COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho (AP) — Security guards refused to allow a woman into a federal courthouse until she removed a bra that triggered a metal detector.
Lori Plato said she and her husband, Owen Plato, were stunned when U.S. Marshals Service employees asked her to remove her bra after the underwire supports set off the alarm.
“I asked if I could go into the bathroom because they didn’t have a privacy screen and no women security officers were available,” Plato said Wednesday. “They said, ‘No.’
“I wasn’t carrying a shank in my bra. If it’s so dangerous, why did they give it back and let me put it on?”
Patrick McDonald, the U.S. Marshal in Boise, said appropriate security protocols were followed in the Sept. 20 matter, and guards suggested she simply remove the bra in her car outside, or find a restaurant bathroom.
“She’s inflating it,” McDonald said. “All of a sudden she just took it off. It wasn’t anything we wanted to happen and it wasn’t anything we asked for her to do. She did it so fast.”
Plato, of Bonners Ferry, said she was parked on a busy street and wasn’t familiar with downtown Coeur d’Alene businesses. So her husband held up his coat to shield her from the rest of the people in the courthouse lobby while she removed her bra underneath her shirt.
Generally, McDonald said, undergarments aren’t considered a danger to security.
“I don’t think they’re considered a weapon, really, the last time I looked,” he said.
He declined to discuss other ways the federal courthouse guards could have screened Plato for weapons.
Plato wants the Marshals Service to apologize and stop forcing women to disrobe.
“It was very humiliating,” her husband, Owen Plato, said. “They could have handled it with a much more professional attitude.”