Pioneering work on the mathematics of blink-free photos has won two Australian scientists an IgNobel Prize.
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NEW YORK: How many photos do you need to take to ensure no-one in the picture has their eyes closed? It's the kind of research that has won a bold duo of Australians an IgNobel prize.
The IgNobels, intended as a tongue-in-cheek alternative to their more formal Scandinavian counterparts, were won by Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of Australia's research agency, the CSIRO. They were presented the award at a ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts overnight.
After extensive testing, the duo came up with a rule of thumb for calculating the number of photos to take for groups of less than 20: divide the number of people by three if there's good light, and two if the light's bad. If there's more than 50 people, forget it.
This year, the IgNobels have also recognised the work of scientists who answered questions such as why woodpeckers don't get headaches, whether dung beetles like their diet and whether rectal massage can cure hiccups.
Ivan Schwab of the University of California Davis and the late Philip May of the University of California Los Angeles have been awarded the ornithology prize for their pioneering work on the ability of the humble woodpecker to avoid head injury.
Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority have taken home the nutrition prize for showing that dung beetles are in fact finicky eaters.
And not to be overlooked, Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee accepted the medicine Ig in person for his report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage".
The prizes are designed to "honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think," according to the organisers.
The winners are given one minute to deliver their acceptance speech, with the time limit strictly policed by an outspoken eight-year-old girl.
The evening traditionally involves members of the audience throwing paper aeroplanes at the stage while Harvard professor Roy Glauber dutifully sweeps up, as he has done for the last 10 years.
Glauber insisted on retaining his sweeping duties for the 16th annual ceremony this year, regardless of the fact he becoming a Nobel physics laureate in 2005.
Despite the ceremony's irreverent tone, the awards are taken increasingly seriously in the scientific community, with eight of the 10 winners this year paying their own way to attend the ceremony.
One of those unable to attend the ceremony for family reasons was Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, who was awarded the peace prize for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant.
The device makes an annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults. He later used the same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers.
Three American scientists, Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand, were awarded the acoustics prize for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.
Physics laureates Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of Paris University were honoured for their insights into why dry spaghetti tends to break into more than two pieces.
And while the conclusions of a group of scientists from Valencia University and the University of Illes Balears in Spain were not immediately clear, the judges deemed their study "Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature" worthy of the chemistry prize.
Also honoured for cheese research, Bart Knols from Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands won the biology award for his part in research showing that female malaria mosquito are equally attracted to limburger cheese and human feet.
Former winners expected at the ceremony were Don Featherstone, creator of the plastic pink flamingo, Kees Moeliker, who reported the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck and Stefano Ghirlanda, co-author of the study "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans."
