Dr. Elena Bodnar places her invention on Nobel laureate Wolfgang Ketterle (Photo by Steven Senne / AP)

Umm…so there was a bit of confusion today with the scheduling.  I thought there was a post going up, but there wasn’t. This is what life is like when you’re going senile. Anyway, it’s a little late to do the news, but I think this counts as both a WTF and a News Day Tuesday, so here we go!

Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, Illinois won the Public Health Prize at this year’s Ig Nobel Awards for their “gas mask bra” – it’s a bra that turns into a pair of protective face masks – one for the bra owner, and one for a needy bystander. This is an actual invention with a patent (Garment device convertible to one or more facemasks).

The Ig Nobel Awards are held every year, to honor scientific achievements “that first make people laugh, then make them think.” This year’s awards were held a few days ago, on October 1st. Other 2009 winners include:

• VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows with names give more milk than cows without names.
• PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for experimentally determining whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle. (Both can fracture your skull, but full bottles will cause less damage.)
• PHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don’t tip over. (Human female bodies have a curvature and a reinforcement of the lower back that help compensate for the extra load.)
• BIOLOGY PRIZE: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen garbage can be reduced by more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from panda poop.

To read more about the Ig Nobel awards, or see the full list of winners, visit the Improbable Research site. You’ll find links to the research papers as well.

So GBD! The gas mask bra…Win, Toss, or Fail?