GRAPHENE

Announcing the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize Winners. As most of you know this is a yearly award prior to the Nobel Prize announcements which celebrates research which make people laugh , then think.The yearly awards are given out at the Harvard Sander's Theatre in Boston.

ENGINEERING PRIZE: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.

REF: A Novel Non-Invasive Tool for Disease Surveillance of Free-Ranging Whales and Its Relevance to Conservation Programs

Note- Snot(Muku Chali) can show the disease pattern in whales and its relationship to decrease in their numbers.

MEDICINE PRIZE: Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.

REF: "Rollercoaster Asthma: When Positive Emotional Stress Interferes with Dyspnea Perception,"

TRANSPORTATION PLANNING PRIZE: Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.

REFERENCE: "Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design,"

PHYSICS PRIZE: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.

REF: "Preventing Winter Falls: A Randomised Controlled Trial of a Novel Intervention,"

PEACE PRIZE: Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.

REFERENCE: "Swearing as a Response to Pain," .

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety Office, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, for determining by experiment that microbes cling to bearded scientists.
REFERENCE: "Microbiological Laboratory Hazard of Bearded Men," .

ECONOMICS PRIZE: The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Eric Adams of MIT, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University, Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii, and BP [British Petroleum], for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix.

REFERENCE: "Review of Deep Oil Spill Modeling Activity Supported by the Deep Spill JIP and Offshore Operator’s Committee. Final Report," Eric Adams and Scott Socolofsky, 2005.WHO

MANAGEMENT PRIZE: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.

REFERENCE: “The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,”

BIOLOGY PRIZE- not suitable for a family blog like ours. So please google if interested.

Now this year is of interest because the 2010 Physics Nobel prize winners Geim and Novoselov from Univ of Manchester , UK, were Ig nobel winners in 2000. The Ig nobel prize was given to Dr Geim when he managed to levitate a live frog using a magnetic field.

The physics nobel prize was for investigating the ultra thin carbon flake known as Graphene. Graphene is not only the thinnest material known but also the strongest and hardest and its applications are going to be wide. Stay tuned