2007 Ig Nobel Awards Announced

prostoalex writes "The annual Ig Noble awards by Annals of Improbable Research were announced tonight. The winners included the scientists who discovered that impotence drugs help with jet lag recovery, "a Dutch researcher who conducted a census of all the creepy-crawlies that share our beds, Spanish scientists who found that rats sometimes could not distinguish between Japanese spoken backwards and Dutch spoken backwards, an Australian woman who documented the indexing problems caused by the word "the", a Japanese researcher who extracted vanilla flavoring from cow dung, and a Taiwanese man who patented a Batman-like device that drops a net over bank robbers," MSNBC says."

Comments

Soup Bowl experiment may help dieting

[Russell Coker]

The research that showed people eating more soup (without feeling more full) if the bowl was filled without them noticing is not interesting on it's own. But if the opposite is true then it may be commercially successful.

What if you had a soup bowl that sucked soup out without the eater noticing, if they felt full after believing that they ate a large bowl of soup then it might make dieting a lot easier!

If the appearance of food size determines how much people eat then maybe different shaped bowls could affect how much people eat. Maybe a bowl that makes a serve of food look big would encourage people to eat less.