BOSTON (AP) — A device that gets talkative people to shut up has won an Ig Nobel, the prize given out annually for zany scientific achievement.
The awards are given out by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine. They were handed out Thursday at a silly ceremony at Harvard University that featured a humorous mini-opera and the launching of hundreds of paper airplanes.
The SpeechJammer was invented by Japanese researchers. It repeats the speaker's own voice at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds.
Other winners included engineers who studied coffee sloshing around in a cup; researchers who studied why leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower look smaller; a team that demonstrated that sophisticated equipment can detect brain activity in dead fish; and scientists who explained how and why ponytails bounce.
