Cutting Edge

Have you ever worried that knuckle cracking will give you arthritis or wondered why pregnant women don't tip over? Me too.

Research into those topics--as well as studies finding that diamonds could be created from tequila and giant panda feces are good for composting--received Ig Nobel Prizes in a ceremony on Thursday night at Harvard University.

The prizes, awarded to scientific achievements that "cannot and should not be reproduced," are presented in the week before the real Nobel prizes are announced and are sponsored by the science humor magazine "Annals of Improbable Research."

A Thousand Oaks, Calif., doctor won the Ig Nobel medicine prize for his firsthand research into arthritis in fingers. As a child and in adulthood, Donald Unger's mother, several aunts, and mother-in-law warned him that cracking his knuckles would lead to arthritis in his fingers. To test that theory, he cracked the knuckles of his left hand, but not the right hand, every day for more than 60 years.

His conclusion? The cracking has no effect. (A chiropractor in San Francisco previously agreed with that notion in a very unscientific survey conducted by me.)

In Switzerland, the half-liter refillable beer bottle is commonly used as a weapon in bar fights and can crack a skull, researchers said.

(Credit: Stephan Bolliger/Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine)

"There was no arthritis in either hand, and no apparent differences between the two hands," Unger wrote in a letter to the editor in Arthritis and Rheumatism, Vol. 41, No. 5, in 1998, after he had completed only 50 years of his study.

"This result calls into question whether other parental beliefs, e.g., the importance of eating spinach, are also flawed," he wrote. "Further investigation is likely warranted."

The Ig Nobel Prize for peace went to a group at the University of Bern in Switzerland for its bar room brawl-related research. The doctors, several of whom are forensic pathologists, had been asked to testify in court cases whether a skull can be broken by smashing a beer bottle on someone's head--and whether that is more easily accomplished with a full bottle or an empty one.

"Full and empty bottles suffice in breaking the skull. However, the likelihood of such fractures is greater in blows with an empty bottle. Empty beer bottles are therefore more dangerous," Dr. Stephan Bolliger wrote in an e-mail response to questions on Friday.

Asked whether certain beer brands might be more dangerous than others, Bolliger said, "The brand of the bottle is irrelevant, as the major breweries in Switzerland all use the same, recyclable half-liter bottles."

The research paper concludes that because half-liter beer bottles present "formidable weapons" in a fight, "prohibition of these bottles is therefore justified in situations which involve risk of human conflicts."

Meanwhile, other Ig Nobel-honored research suggests that farmers can benefit from improved human-bovine relations. Researchers at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom won the veterinary-medicine prize for their work showing that "Bessie" is likely to produce more milk than "No. 5863329."

"On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case," the researchers wrote in an abstract for their paper, "Exploring Stock Managers' Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production."

In Japan, researchers turned to a beloved animal for help in home waste reduction. A team at the Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara won the biology prize for "demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90 percent in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas."

The physics prize went to researchers from the University of Cincinnati, the University of Texas, and Harvard for "analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over" in their paper "Fetal Load and the Evolution of Lumbar Lordosis in Bipedal Hominins."

And in a modern-day alchemy experiment, researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico received the chemistry prize for turning tequila into diamonds. Well, maybe not exactly diamonds, but diamond films that could be an economical component in electrical insulators.

The public-health prize was awarded to inventors who received a patent for a brassiere that can be converted into a pair of gas masks.

There were also awards for findings that came of less research. The economics prize was awarded to officials from four Icelandic banks "for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa--and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy."

The mathematics prize went to the governor of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank for "giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers--from very small to very big--by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from 1 cent to 100 trillion dollars."

And finally, the prize for literature was given to Ireland's police service for writing more than 50 traffic tickets to "the most frequent driving offender in the country--Prawo Jazdy--whose name in Polish means "Driver's License."

I always like to write about technology that wasn't designed to serve a market (meaning, consumers who will pay) per se, but which was designed with a humanitarian need in mind.

Students from the B.V. Bhoomaraddi College of Engineering and Technology in India won an award for developing electronic aids for handicapped children.

(Credit: IEEE)

On Thursday in Los Angeles the IEEE (formerly the acronym for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) is holding its first IEEE Presidents' Change the World Competition award ceremony.

The world's largest technical professional society is granting prize money to students from around the world who develop "unique solutions to real-world problems using engineering, science, computing and leadership skills to benefit their community and/or humanity as a whole."

The IEEE Student Humanitarian Supreme Prize of $10,000 will be awarded to two Stanford students for developing what they called the NanoLab, "a hand-held diagnostic laboratory capable of quantitative multiplex protein detection in a very simple to use, wash-free assay," which would be particularly useful in developing countries.

A team of 19 students from B.V. Bhoomaraddi College of Engineering and Technology in India are receiving a $5,000 prize for developing electronic games, devices, and toys designed to stimulate physically and mentally handicapped children and encourage exercises.

A bicycle-powered grain crusher, targeting developing countries without easy access to electricity for motors, won five students from Rowan University in New Jersey a $2,500 prize.

Smaller prizes were awarded for other projects, including one involving robots in agriculture, several related to distributing electricity in rural and small communities, and electronic health care for the under-privileged.

Every fall the Tech Museum in San Jose, Calif., grants awards for technology innovation that benefits humanity.

Corrected at 8:50 a.m. PDT: The award ceremony is Thursday.

Matthew T. Mason, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has won an award for his "pioneering contributions to the fundamental understanding of the mechanics of robotic manipulation and to graduate education in robotics."

The Robotics and Automation Society, which bestowed Mason with its annual Pioneer Award, is part of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE). So while the monetary prize for the lifetime achievement award is only $2,000, a lot of prestige comes with the plaque he was given over the weekend.

Matthew T. Mason heads the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

(Credit: Carnegie Mellon)

Mason's body of work includes robotic juggling, legless robotic travel, robotic locomotion, handless robotic manipulation of objects (robot soccer), and robotic origami. Mason's famous robotic origami project, in which robots build origami cranes from paper, was lauded for the progress it made in developing robotic agility with soft objects.

Mason also wrote the book "Mechanics of Robotic Manipulation."

But the general public will likely remember Mason for something else entirely. With the help of Mason--and under Jim Morris, who was computer science school dean at the time--Carnegie Mellon opened the Robot Hall of Fame in 2003.

The hall of fame honors both real and fictional robots as a way to engage public interest in robotics and engineering. While the Robot Hall of Fame technically rewards the robots themselves and not their creators, Mason would be a likely candidate if the rules change.

Mason, who is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the IEEE, earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in computer science and artificial intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He has been a Carnegie Mellon faculty member since 1982.

For more insights on his work and thoughts on robotics, read CNET's Q&A with Mason.

Employees at the Cheetah Conservation Fund's Biomass Energy Project use tech to convert bush into blocks of clean-burning fuel.

(Credit: Biomass Energy Project, Cheetah Conservation Fund)

A group working to save land in Namibia, projects bringing power to Indian villages and building earthquake-resistant homes in Indonesia, the maker of a single-use syringe, and a group that uses technology in classrooms in India were the winners of the Tech Museum awards held Wednesday.

The Biomass Energy Project, Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia won the 2008 Intel Environment Award. The group converts invasive bush into clean fuel. It employs 15 people at a biomass processing plant that uses a high-pressure extrusion process to create an economically viable alternative to firewood, coal, and charcoal. The fund is working to recover 25 million acres of land in Namibia and to save endangered cheetahs.

DESI Power: Decentralised Energy Systems India won the 2008 Accenture Economic Development Award. DESI Power is helping more than 100 villages build power plants to areas that lack electricity and is creating jobs with the launch of micro-enterprises. The DESI plants use 19th-century technology--biomass gasification through agricultural waste.

A completely different type of invention took the prize for education. Described as the educational equivalent of Netflix + YouTube + Kazaa, the peer-to-peer file-sharing system Digital Study Hall won the Microsoft Education Award. The Lucknow, India-based project records classroom lessons from experienced teachers on DVDs and distributes them to underprivileged classrooms in India and Bangladesh. Students participating in Digital Study Hall scored nearly 400 times higher on English tests and nearly 300 times higher in math.

The Katherine M. Swanson Equality Award was given to Build Change, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that designs and trains builders and homeowners how to build earthquake-resistant houses in developing countries. The designs use local materials, and are affordable and sustainable, as well as easy to build. In Aceh, Indonesia, alone, Build Change has strengthened 4,200 homes and trained 130 builders. The group also has programs in West Sumatra, Indonesia, and Sichuan, China.

Winning the Fogarty Institute for Innovation Health Award is Marc Koska who developed a syringe that reduces the spread of disease because it can only be used once. The plunger in the K1 "Auto Disable" Syringe developed by Star Syringe locks in place when it is fully depressed, preventing it from being used repeatedly, a common cause of cross-infection among patients in the developing world. The single-use syringes save millions of people from getting infected with Hepatitis B and C and HIV.

For more information about the K1 syringe and four other Tech Awards laureates, read "Tech Museum honors tech that benefits humanity".

Digital Study Hall students benefit from watching lessons on DVD in their underprivileged classrooms in India and Bangladesh.

(Credit: Digital Study Hall)

A Huichol woman does bead work while her son finishes his homework by the light of a Portable Light device.

(Credit: KVA MATx)

Living in San Francisco, we take technology for granted. We have YouTube and iPhones and online maps. We get annoyed when a Web page downloads too slow or our phone call drops.

Then there are the millions of people who don't live in developed countries, who go without the Web and even electricity and light for most if not all of their day. For them, things like Windows 7 and Facebook are irrelevant, but they still dominate the technology landscape.

There are some innovators designing technology for use by the rest of the world, companies and nonprofits that are applying technology to help people improve their lives. The Tech Museum in San Jose, Calif., offers its Tech Museum of Innovation awards to projects that apply technology to benefit humanity.

Established in 2001, the awards recognize 25 laureates in the categories of education, equality, environment, economic development, and health. One laureate in each category will receive a $50,000 cash prize. The winners will be announced at a ceremony on Wednesday night at which professor Muhammad Yunus, a pioneer of microcredit and founder of Grameen Bank, will speak.

CNET News talked to 5 of the 25 laureates and got a glimpse of some of the technologies that are doing things like preventing spread of disease from reuse of infected needles, monitoring the air around farms for dangerous pesticides, turning the PC into a 3D design tool, and bringing light to dark places on the map.

Textiles that illuminate
Sheila Kennedy was traveling in Mexico studying solar applications in 2002 when she saw a group of native Huichol women cooking by the side of the road because they had insufficient light to cook in their homes and she had an epiphany. She saw a practical use for flexible solar panel technology and solid-state lighting that her architectural design firm in Boston, Kennedy & Violich Architecture, was experimenting with.

A Huichol woman wears a Portable Light device integrated into textiles that can be worn.

(Credit: KVA MATx)

She formed a nonprofit, the Portable Light Project, and began a collaboration with renewable-energy think tank The Rocky Mountain Institute to launch a pilot project with the Huichol in the Sierra Madre mountains in north central Mexico. The project provides a way for indigenous communities to have bright light inside their homes at night, recharge the power with the sun during the day, and charge cell phones and medical devices as well.

Participants in the project receive solar kits that they integrate into their textiles to suit their needs. The kit includes one or two thin-film 10-by-4-inch photovoltaic panels, an LED, and a control pouch with digital drive electronics and a small lithium-ion rechargeable battery. The self-contained renewable energy source is lightweight, easy to integrate into existing materials, and is customizable.

"It's an elegant textile surface that can be folded or formed," Kennedy said. "It's got great optics, with parabolic reflector shapes made from folded textiles which bounce reflected light from solid-state lighting sources."

It takes about 2.5 hours to fully charge a battery and it offers about 10 hours of light at about 100 lumens using only 1 watt. By contrast, a 100-watt, 120-volt bulb produces 17.5 lumens per watt.

Projects are under way for Nicaragua, and the Brazilian and Venezuelan Amazonias. The group also is working to use ultraviolet-emitting LEDs for a water purification capacity using portable light. And in another project, Portable Light has created a hospital blanket using the nanotechnology for medical workers in South Africa to send home with patients with HIV who are bedridden.

"Sunlight kills bacteria that causes tuberculosis, but many of the patients sit at home in the dark," Kennedy said. With the blanket "they can wrap themselves in the blanket, produce electricity, store it, and then provide power for their family and caretakers around the clock."

Syringes that save lives
Brit Marc Koska was living in the American Virgin Islands in the early 1980s, "with a first-class honors in beach bum," when he saw a newspaper article about how the reuse of syringes in developing countries would make them a major transmission route for HIV infections. He decided to work on tackling the problem and eventually developed the K1 Syringe, the world's first syringe that automatically disables after it is used once.

Marc Koska talks to some Indian boys at risk of getting infected from needle sticks while digging through a dump.

(Credit: Star Syringe )

A ring in the barrel of the syringe locks the plunger in place once it is fully depressed so it can't be used again. The syringes sell for about 5 cents, he said.

Twenty-four years later, and 17 years of no sales, Koska, now 47, heads up Star Syringe with 14 licensees around the world producing more than 2 million K1 syringes a day. It is estimated that his syringe has saved more than 5 million lives.

"The manufacturing process was the lowest hanging fruit," he said. "It was critical to make a design that would easily retrofit onto existing machinery."

Currently, half of the injections given in the developing world are unsafe (the rate rises to 65 percent in India) and the World Health Organization reports that reused syringes are believed to be responsible for 1.3 million deaths a year, mostly malaria.

"A mother taking her baby to a doctor for any routine vaccination could leave with hepatitis or HIV" because the doctor reused an unclean needle, Koska said. "It happens for many reasons, including poor distribution of supplies, but informing the public of the issue will be critical in tackling this global problem."

His next project, SafePoint Trust, does just that.

Monitoring the air for carcinogens
For decades, people living near farms in California's Central Valley complained that they got headaches, fainted, or got sick after pesticides were sprayed on nearby crops.

Jorge Alvarado operates the Drift Catcher while PANNA Scientist Karl Tupper stands by.

(Credit: Sara Bjorkqvist)

Pesticide exposure has been linked to increased incidences of certain types of cancer, birth defects, Parkinson's disease, asthma, and other illness. According to a 2007 study, autism rates for children born to California women exposed to certain pesticides during their first trimester of pregnancy were six times greater than normal. Still, communities have been told that spraying is safe. Without any proof otherwise it seemed there was nothing that could be done.

That is until Dr. Susan Kegley developed the Drift Catcher for the San Francisco-based Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA).

The device is an easy-to-use, affordable air monitoring system that measures the concentrations of hazardous pesticides in the air. A vacuum pump pulls air through two glass sampling tubes. The tubes contain a resin which traps pesticides as the air moves through. Tubes are typically changed every 24 hours and samples must remain cold until they are analyzed by PANNA scientists in the laboratory.

"The device enables communities to scientifically document when levels of pesticides in the air near their homes and playgrounds exceed what the Environmental Protection Agency says are safe," said Kathryn Gilje, executive director of PANNA.

"Now, we can amass enough data to make a change in policy to make (pesticide drift) illegal," Kegley said. "Air sampling has been around for a long time, but now you can do it cheaply enough so someone can set it up in their back yard" and start measuring when they see the tractors spraying pesticides.

The Pesticide Action Network has about 50 of the devices out in the field. The Drift Catcher has been used by community activists in California, Minnesota, Florida, Washington, Indiana, Maine, and Hawaii.

Evidence from the Drift Catcher devices likely played a role in keeping the maker of the herbicide molinate on track for voluntarily withdrawing the chemical from the market. It also played a role in the EPA requiring larger buffer zones around fumigated fields and requiring farmers to provide notice to the community about what pesticide they are using, Kegley said.

The group also is pushing the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help farmers move away from using toxic chemicals and adopt safer alternatives.

Renewable light by the hour
Andy Schroeter learned first-hand about the difficulties people in developing countries have getting affordable access to light sources when he was working in Laos and Vietnam for a German development organization beginning in 1995. Not only are 44 percent of the population in Laos off the electricity grid, but paying for kerosene to light lamps winds up being one of the highest costs for a household.

Men in Laos get trained on how to operate solar panels that recharge lanterns rented to villagers. Note the solar panels on top of their hats.

(Credit: Sunlabob Renewable Energy)

So Schroeter created the Sunlabob Renewable Energy company to help solve that problem.

Based in Laos, the company rents large central solar charging stations to village businesses which, in turn, rent out rechargeable exchangeable solar lanterns to households. The lanterns can be used to charge mobile phones, small TVs, radios, and laptops.

"We are creating a sustainable model for a village," Schroeter said. "In rural areas in developing countries people don't have the cash to pay for initial investments for the hardware."

Each lantern has an integrated microprocessor that alerts a user when the power is low and collects data that can be used for carbon offset purposes.

The lantern light lasts for about 10 hours and costs as little as 40 cents, Schroeter said, adding that light lasts as long as three days for families in Laos.

In addition to Laos, Sunlabob is providing services to villages or has franchises in Uganda, Cambodia, Singapore, and Tanzania and will soon be operating in Afghanistan.

3D for the masses
When Daniel Ratai was 13 he wanted to design cars. But he found that using pencil and paper was too limiting and there were no computer programs that would allow him to do exactly what he wanted.

Research institutes are using Leonar3Do for pharmaceutical research.

(Credit: 3D for All)

"In kindergarten I tried to draw 3D designs on paper. I dreamed about drawing into the space," says Ratai, a Hungarian. "I could imagine the car in my head and see it on the top of a table."

So, when he was 18 he started working on a system that would let him do as he wanted. His firm, 3D For All, developed the Leonar3Do console and specialized software that works with any PC.

Sensors attach to the monitor and the user wears a pair of 3D goggles and draws with a 3D pen, creating whatever their mind can imagine in the space in front of the monitor.

The system can be used for creating virtual environments, buildings, anything. A research group is using it to control 3D microscopes for molecule docking, Ratai said.

Prototypes are currently being tested and initial systems should be available to the public for between $1,000 and $1,200 next year, he said.