Cocktail Party Physics

We're back! All tanned, rested, and ready to tackle whatever life chooses to hurl our way. It was tough to drag ourselves away from the palm trees, sandy beaches, fruity tropical drinks by the pool, haute cuisine, and luxurious on-site spa, not to mention our own private butler (who seemed disappointed that we didn't need him very much). But the sound of a lonely cat, meowing in the empty Los Angeles apartment, drew us back -- that, and the fact that there were bugs. Big ones, small ones, and (most distressingly) bitey ones. After waking up two mornings in a row with fresh raised welts on my arms, I learned to keep the windows closed, even though I liked listening to the waves crashing on the shore at night.

I have no idea what kind of bug was doing the biting while I was blissfully slumbering, but I'll bet Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands would know. She was honored last week with the 2007 Ig Nobel Biology Prize for her work taking "a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, germs and fungi with whom we share our beds each night." Apparently there's a whole teeming ecosystem of insects in Netherland beds, at least the ones van Bronswijk studied. Her research wasn't alone in being, um, honored with an Ig Nobel Prize. For instance, the Chemistry Prize went to Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan "for developing a way to extract vanillin --vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung." A Cambridge ice cream shop called Toscanini's created a new flavor in Yamamoto's honor: "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist." No word on whether the vanilla flavoring was derived from cow dung.

But by far my favorite of this year's Ig Nobel honorees was the Medicine Prize, awarded to Brian Witcombe, a consulting radiologist at Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust in England, and Dan Meyer, who heads the Sword Swallowers Association International, based in Antioch, Tennessee. They were honored "for their penetrating medical report, 'Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects,'" which was published to almost no fanfare last December in the British Medical Journal -- maybe because it was Christmas and people were too busy swallowing Yorkshire pudding and opening prezzies to pay much attention to the findings.

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