LAUGHTER IN A LAB COAT

Why is airlifting rhinos upside down the best way to transport them? Can roller coasters help pass kidney stones? Welcome to the Ig Nobel Prizes and the science that makes you laugh first, and then think

- BY ANJULY MATHAI

Have you ever wondered why woodpeckers smash their head into a tree 12,000 times a day and still don't get a headache?

We bet you haven't. But two scientists did. The research of Ivan R. Schwab and the late Philip R. May separately explored the superhuman strength of a woodpecker's head. In 1976, May, a psychiatrist and neuroanatomist, argued that understanding a woodpecker's head could give us clues into treating head injuries and designing crash helmets. Years later, Schwab—an ophthalmologist—built on May's research, focusing on the unharmed retinas of the woodpecker.

“Both May in 1976 and Schwab in 2002 suggested that the skull of the woodpecker is so beautifully designed that parts of it act like a shock absorber,” writes Upasana Sarraju in Unruly, her wonderfully absurd book on the Ig Nobel Prizes. “The impact from the beak striking a tree travels along the length of the beak into the skull where it dissipates, like steam from an idli cooker, into the shock absorbers. And because of this, woodpeckers do not develop headaches.”

Their research into the woodpecker skull won May and Schwab the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize in Ornithology. For the award ceremony at Harvard University's Sanders Theatre, Schwab wore a large black helmet adorned to look like the feathered red head of a pileated woodpecker, writes Sarraju. The prize was a wooden concoction of a sphere springing out of a block.

For those of you uninitiated into the world of the Ig Nobels, the awards—a bizarre cousin of the Nobels—were founded by Marc Abrahams in 1991, who as a boy “couldn't stop noticing peculiar things and then asking questions about them until adults became gently alarmed”. To pursue his passion for funny science, he mailed the Israeli duo who founded a strange little magazine called the Journal of Irreproducible Results, or