The venerated Ig Nobel Prizes for 2014 were announced today…
Ig Nobel winner: Using pork to stop nosebleeds
by Mark Pratt
AP
September 18, 2014
BOSTON (AP) – There’s some truth to the effectiveness of folk remedies and old wives’ tales when it comes to serious medical issues, according to findings by a team from Detroit Medical Center.
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. <a href="” target=”_blank”>Read the rest of this article here.
The Ig Nobel prizes – a play on the name of the Nobel prizes awarded every October from Stockholm and Oslo – are given out by the Harvard-based humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research.