Educational and Funny Research Honored

Jillian Clarke won a prize for her work on the "five-second rule" on dropped food. (Preston Keres -- The Washington Post)

"Everyone in the class said 'country music!' " Gundlach said in an interview.

Further research, including analysis of country music lyrics, showed that the major themes -- including the travails of love, drinking alcohol as a way to deal with life's problems, and a sense of hopelessness about work and finances -- have all been linked to increased suicide risk. Country music listeners are also big gun owners.

When Gundlach and Stack tallied suicide rates in 49 large metropolitan areas, they found that the rates went up in sync with the proportion of radio air time devoted to country music.

"We're not saying country music causes people to commit suicide," Gundlach said. But for those already contemplating that course, it probably does not help, he said.

This year's Ig Nobel in Physics went to Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottawa and Michael Turvey of both the University of Connecticut and Yale, for their ground-breaking dissection of the dynamics of Hula Hooping.

As reported in the March 12 online issue of the journal Biological Cybernetics, the team used a magnetic motion tracking system to record the movements of seven paid "intermediate-level" Hula Hoopers, then applied the "Karhunen-Loève decomposition" to the "kinematics of the lower limbs" to see if the "vertical suspension mode and an oscillatory fore-aft mode . . . might stabilize the hoop's angular momentum."

For those who don't want to read the 15-page paper, replete with some daunting equations, the short answer, Turvey said, is "basically, yes."

When it comes to applying the tools of science to everyday phenomena, though, perhaps no one is more deserving of an Ig Nobel than Jillian Clarke. As a high school senior in a University of Illinois mentoring program last summer, Clarke literally put the "five-second rule" under the microscope.

First she surveyed 100 adults' attitudes about the rule. She found that women are more likely than men to eat food that has fallen on the floor, and that cookies and candy were most likely to be picked up and eaten, while broccoli and cauliflower were least likely.

Then she did microbial sampling of a variety of floors -- "elevators, kitchens and cafeterias, labs, bathrooms, classrooms, everywhere," said Clarke, now a freshman at Howard University.

Gratifyingly, she found relatively low bacteria counts on most floors, suggesting that the health risk of eating from floors may be lower than many people think. But what about germy floors? To find out, Clarke dropped gummy bears and cookie pieces on floors she had coated with bacteria, then picked them up within five seconds and used culture plates and a scanning electron microscope to count the number of bacteria that clung to the treats.

Smooth floors transferred more of their bacteria to food than did rough floors. But in general, Clarke said, "We found consistently high numbers of bacteria" on the retrieved food, indicating that the popular rule will not save you if the floors are not clean.

For her novel study of a household truism -- and for conducting what may be the first electron microscopy study of gummy bears, which look "really shriveled" at super-high magnification, she said -- Clarke received this year's Ig Nobel in Public Health.

Alas, science will have to get by without her from here. Having peaked early in her career, she has decided to major in finance.