The annual science awards that academia awaits with bated breath were announced this week - the Ignobel Awards.

And there’s even some local flavour this year with an Australian team winning a mathematics prize for calculating the number of shots a photographer must take to almost ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed. Congratulations to Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of CSIRO for this earthshattering research! Apparently the guts of it is, for groups of less than 20, you divide the number of people by three if there’s good light or a decent flash, and two if the light’s bad.

Hopefully they did some real research while on the government payroll at CSIRO, and the work they got their prize for was done on their own time.

Other noteworthy scientific achievers awarded prizes included:

• PEACE – Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing a teen-ager repellent – a device that makes a high-pitched noise that is annoying to teen-agers but inaudible to most adults; and for later using the technology to make cellphone ringtones that teenagers can hear but not their teachers.

• ACOUSTICS – D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand of Chicago’s Northwestern University for a 1986 experiment aimed at discovering why the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard is so irritating.

• MEDICINE – Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine and the team of Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center in Haifa, Israel who both published studies entitled “Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage.”

Regarding the last one, I think I’ll stick to the tried and tested remedies for hiccups, like breathing into a paper bag, rather than sticking a finger up my arse.

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