Ig Nobel winner: Using pork to stop nosebleeds.
Dr. Sonal Saraiya and her colleagues in Michigan found that packing strips of cured pork in the nose of a child who suffers from uncontrollable, life-threatening nosebleeds can stop the hemorrhaging, a discovery that won them a 2014 Ig Nobel prize, the annual award for sometimes inane, yet often surprisingly practical, scientific discoveries.
This
year's winners honored Thursday at Harvard University by the Annals of
Improbable Research magazine included a team of researchers who wondered
if owning a cat was bad for your mental health; Japanese scientists who
tested whether banana peels are really as slippery as cartoons would
have us believe; and Norwegian biologists who tested whether reindeer on
the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard were frightened by humans dressed to
resemble polar bears.
As has
become the custom, real Nobel laureates handed out the prizes and
winners were given a maximum of 60 seconds to deliver their acceptance
speech,
Sticking pork
products up the patient's nose was a treatment of last resort when
conventional treatments had failed, Saraiya said, and was only used for a
very specific condition known as Glanzmann thrombasthenia, a rare
condition in which blood does not properly clot.
"We had to do
some out-of-the-box thinking," she said. "So that's where we put our
heads together and thought to the olden days and what they used to do."
The method worked because "there are some clotting factors in the pork ... and the high level of salt will pull in a lot of fluid from the nose," she said.
Still, Soraiya does not recommend sticking pork up your nose for a routine nosebleed, as it could cause infection.
Kiyoshi
Mabuchi, a professor of biomedical engineering at Kitasato University
in Japan, studied the slipperiness of banana peels as an extension of
his research into human joint lubrication system.
"I have gotten ... evidence that the friction under banana peels is sufficiently low to make us slip," Mabuchi said via email.
Several scientists won for studying the mental health of cat owners. The bottom line? Owning a cat may be hazardous to your health.
Dr.
David Hanauer, of the department of pediatrics at the University of
Michigan and co-author of one of the studies, says there's no reason for
cat owners to panic.
"It may
simply be that people with depression gets cats because they feel
depressed," he said. "I am in no way telling people to get rid of their
cats."
Professor Kang Lee at
the University of Toronto in Canada was part of a team that won for
studying the reactions of people who see human faces in slices of toast.
Although the title of the study was called "Seeing Jesus in Toast," no
actual images of Jesus were shown. But the study found that in people
who merely think they see a face in a slice of toast — or in any other
unusual object — the part of the brain involved in facial recognition
lights up.
Although his research has legitimate scientific value, he said he's thrilled to win an Ig Nobel.
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