Bacon-related medical breakthrough wins Ig Nobel prize

Is there nothing that can’t be solved with the judicious application of bacon? Apparently not, as this year’s Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine winners can attest.

The boffins from the US and India took home the gong for their paper on treating “uncontrollable" nosebleeds by packing the nose with strips of cured pork.

The Ig Nobels, awarded for, shall we say, quirky scientific projects, were handed out last night in a ceremony at Harvard University. Dr Sonal Saraiya, one of the medical boffins, was on hand to accept the prize for the bacon-packing team.

She said that stuffing the patient’s nose with pork was a bit of a last resort after conventional treatment failed.

"We had to do some out-of-the-box thinking," she told the Associated Press. "So that's where we put our heads together and thought to the olden days and what they used to do."

The old wives’ tale works because of the clotting factors in the meat and the high level of salt from curing, which helps soak up the blood. It’s not one that you should try at home for a regular nosebleed, though, and not just because it’s a waste of good pork. The treatment is only a last resort for unstoppable bleeds because it could cause infection.

Other Ig Nobels were handed over for humourous advancements in a variety of fields, including physics, neuroscience, psychology and economics.

A Japanese team snapped up the physics prize for its examination of why folks slip on banana skins on the ground, while the neuroscience gong went to a Chinese and Canadian group for trying to figure out what’s happening in people’s brains when they see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.

The Italian government’s National Institute of Statistics was the well-deserved winner of the economics prize after meeting an EU diktat for every member state to increase the official size of their national economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling and other illegal financial transactions.

The UK and Australia nabbed the award in psychology, for showing that people who always stay up late are usually more self-admiring, more manipulative and more psychopathic than folks who get up early in the morning.

Dr Peter Jonason of the University of Western Sydney and colleagues from Liverpool Hope University assessed the sleeping habits of over 250 people and found that those awake late at night tended to display greater antisocial tendencies.

"The features of the night - a low-light environment when others are sleeping - may facilitate casual sex, mate-poaching, and risk-taking," he said in a statement.

"Indeed, most crimes and most sexual activity peak at night, suggesting just such a link."

The dean of his school Professor Kevin Dunn praised Jonason for his Ig Nobel win.

"Winning the Ig Nobel Award is a fantastic achievement, and provides academics with the opportunity to talk about importance of research to a wide audience who may not always be engaged in science," he said.

"The motto of the prize is to 'honour the achievements that first make people laugh, and then think', and past winners have proved interesting research can lead to significant breakthroughs."

The full list of Ig Nobel prize winners, along with links to their winning research, can be found here. ®