Their science draws laughs, and prizes
Scientists who explained why woodpeckers don't get headaches and calculated the number of photographs required to ensure nobody in a group shot will have their eyes closed are among this year's winners of the Ig Nobel Prizes -- honoring science that makes people laugh as well as think.
The prizes, timed to coincide with the announcements of the real Nobel Prizes this week, were presented by Nobel laureates last night at Harvard University's Sanders Theatre.
The only local winner: Dr. Lynn Halpern, an ophthalmologist with Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates in West Roxbury, who, with colleagues then at Northeastern University, wrote a paper in 1986 examining why the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard is so universally hated.
Co author Randolph Blake described the project, in which volunteers listened to the sound repeatedly with various frequencies removed, as the ``most gruesome experiment I've ever put together." In the end, he and Halpern said in interviews, the researchers speculated, though didn't prove, that the fingernails-on-blackboard sound is quite similar to the warning cries of a wild macaque monkey. ``It's a residual biological signature that we still carry with us," said Blake, a psychology professor at Vanderbilt University.
Other research topics that were recognized this year: evidence that the female malaria mosquito is attracted equally to the smells of limburger cheese and human feet; and the development of telephone ringtones that are audible to teens but not their teachers.
One researcher traveled from Kuwait to present her work showing that dung beetles are picky about the dung they will eat.
Winners will explain their work tomorrow at a free public event at 1 p.m. at MIT's Stata Center, 32 Vassar St., Cambridge.
For more information, go to www. improbable.com/ig/ig-top.html.
(Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story in Friday's City & Region section about the winners of the Ig Nobel awards named a wrong university for two of the winners. Dr. Lynn Halpern and Randolph Blake were at Northwestern University when they studied why the sound of fingernails scraping a blackboard is so hated.)
