Have you ever wondered why woodpeckers smash their head into a tree 12,000 times a day and still don’t get a headache? We bet you haven’t. But two scientists did. The research of Ivan R. Schwab and the late Philip R. May separately explored the superhuman strength of a woodpecker’s head. In 1976, May, a psychiatrist and neuroanatomist, argued that understanding a woodpecker’s head could give us clues into treating head injuries and designing crash helmets. Years later, Schwab—an ophthalmologist—built on May’s research, focusing on the unharmed retinas of the woodpecker.
“Both May in 1976 and Schwab in 2002 suggested that the skull of the woodpecker is so beautifully designed that parts of it act like a shock absorber,” writes Upasana Sarraju in Unruly, her wonderfully absurd book on the Ig Nobel Prizes. “The impact from the beak striking a tree travels along the length of the beak into the skull where it dissipates, like steam from an idli cooker, into the shock absorbers. And because of this, woodpeckers do not develop headaches.”
Their research into the woodpecker skull won May and Schwab the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize in Ornithology. For the award ceremony at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, Schwab wore a large black helmet adorned to look like the feathered red head of a pileated woodpecker, writes Sarraju. The prize was a wooden concoction of a sphere springing out of a block.
For those of you uninitiated into the world of the Ig Nobels, the awards—a bizarre cousin of the Nobels—were founded by Marc Abrahams in 1991, who as a boy “couldn’t stop noticing peculiar things and then asking questions about them until adults became gently alarmed”. To pursue his passion for funny science, he mailed the Israeli duo who founded a strange little magazine called the Journal of Irreproducible Results, or JIR, which was the only publication he could find printing such research. Weeks later, they mailed him back asking if he would like to become editor of the journal. He agreed, and together they began the arduous task of restoring the magazine. Things were beginning to look up when a new company president decided to axe the magazine. A few other mishaps later, Marc walked out and started his own publication—The Annals of Improbable Research, which organised the Ig Nobels.
Today, a whole ecosystem has developed around the awards, like the Improbable Research podcast. A few whimsical communities, too, have sprung up, such as the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, which started as a joke between Abrahams and his wife who dreamed of a psychology journal where every paper had to mention Steven Pinker’s famously luxuriant locks. “Scientists with glorious locks (or, in some cases, glorious former locks) are inducted into a tongue-in-cheek society that celebrates their follicles and their flair for the ludicrous,” writes Sarraju. Nobel laureates hand out the awards each year. Winners must explain their research in 24 seconds and in seven words. The audience throws paper planes at the stage and cheers every time anyone mentions the theme of that year’s ceremony. The time is kept strictly. Anyone who rambles on is interrupted by a girl—Miss Sweetie Poo—who repeatedly yells, “Please stop. I’m bored.”
Sarraju first spoke to Abrahams while doing a course in science writing at Johns Hopkins. In the first semester, all the students had to choose someone to interview. The Ig Nobels had been at the back of her mind for almost a decade, so she decided to write to Abrahams. “I thought about who I could talk to that other people would not and also would blow the instructors’ socks away because of how unusual it was,” Sarraju told THE WEEK. “Marc responded and we did a video call. I was going through my questions and at some point it stopped being an interview and turned into a conversation. Marc has an incredible mind and probably does a million interviews a year with top science magazines. He still agreed to speak to a random student and that blew my mind. Nobody had treated me with such respect.”
After speaking with him once more for an article in the college magazine, Sarraju had put it out of her mind until 2023, when she saw an ad on LinkedIn—a call for submissions for the India Science Book Fellowship. She found the leftover notes from her interview and turned it into a pitch. She was one of the three winners of the award that year, and with the grant of Rs10 lakh, she could begin work on her book. Unlike most people, Sarraju’s interests are a curious blend of science and art. As a child, she devoured science books and periodicals like National Geographic and Britannica Encyclopedias. After graduating in biotechnology, she decided to do her PhD in stem cell research at the National University of Singapore. But she hated the programme, quit half-way and then decided to get into the arts, dabbling in theatre in Puducherry, some voice acting and minor playback singing in south Indian films. Then she plunged into science once more, studying population genetics of Asian elephants at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, before quitting to work as a communication strategist with NGOs working in animal welfare, conservation and ecology. “My life had to be entirely science or art—and I was always pulled in both directions constantly—until I discovered science writing, where I could blend both,” says Sarraju.
There is one other thing that defines Sarraju’s writing—humour—shaped by her childhood years of reading Calvin & Hobbes, Asterix & Obelix and The Adventures of Tintin. Even when she was into theatre, she preferred absurdist theatre. She loves sarcasm, wordplay and humour packed with references that you can “revisit every single time and still walk away feeling fresh”. Her love for humour lends itself beautifully to her book, which is packed with quirky science presented with wit and satire.
And it is not just the science, but those who are behind it, too. Scientists who are deeply cerebral, but also mischievous and funny. In India, when we think of famous scientists, the names that come to mind are C.V. Raman, Homi Bhabha and their ilk. But hidden in the crevices are those like Jagadish Chandra Bose who, apart from revolutionising physics and biology with his research into plant communication, radio waves and optics, also became India’s first science fiction writer to write a colonial-era sci-fi story featuring a bottle of hair oil at its centre. Sarraju also interacted with various other Indian scientists known for their academic mirth, many of whom have won the Ig Nobel. Like Chittaranjan Andrade whose study—‘A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample’—otherwise known as nose-picking among teenagers, won the Ig Nobel in 2001. The prize that year was two cans attached by a string with a mobile phone in between.
Or take Kolkata-born Dr Arindam Banerjee, who is trying to solve the problem of nuclear fusion using mayonnaise. Or K.P. Sreekumar, who measured elephants for their bodies’ surface area and volume. Or Sanjay A. Pai and Sweta Shivashanker, two doctors from Columbia Asia Referral Hospital in Malleswaram, Bengaluru, who attempted to study whether surgeons are spunkier than non-surgeons using a sample study of 16 surgeons and non-surgeons, all men aged between 32 and 59. “Surgeons are known to be bolder than other members of the medical profession,” they wrote in their study published in The Annals of Improbable Research. “Testosterone levels are known to be higher in aggressive men. We wondered whether the above two statements indicated that the spunkiness of surgeons was related to higher testosterone levels.”
At the end of the day, writes Sarraju, the Ig Nobels tell us about how we perceive science. “They show us how entire fields of research can be overlooked because they don’t fit neatly into our idea of what ‘important’ science looks like,” she writes. “And they prove that the next great discovery could just as easily be hidden in a report about whether playing the didgeridoo helps with sleep apnoea as in a report about quantum computing.”
UNRULY: THE IG NOBEL PRIZES AND THE SCIENCE THAT REFUSES TO BEHAVE
By Upasana Sarraju
Published by Penguin
Price Rs499; pages 318