Cookie cataclysms and the undead

Admit it: you've been lying awake at night wondering about the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces. Well, now your worries are finally over. A team of Australian scientists has studied this very subject, receiving the "Ig Nobel Prize in Physics" for its work Thursday (www.ignobel.org).\nThe science and humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research presents the Ig Nobel Prizes annually as a spoof of the Nobel Prizes. Though the prizes are invariably amusing, they often point to serious issues as well. For instance, the 2002 Economics Prize was awarded to officials at Enron, Arthur Andersen and several other companies "for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world."\nLal Bihari of India was awarded this year's Peace Prize "for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and third, for creating the "Association of Dead People," declared the Ig Nobel committee. \nBihari was listed as deceased in 1976 and has since found thousands of other Indians among the living dead. Apparently, officials are bribed to declare landowners dead so that relatives can "inherit" their property. \nBihari could not attend the awards ceremony because, as if resurrection from the dead weren't enough for him, the ungrateful wretch demanded a visa, too.\n"The Indian government, which didn't recognize his life, gave him a passport," Annals editor Marc Abrahams said. "But the American government, the paragon of efficiency and helpfulness, won't give him a visa. You would expect a man who comes back from the dead would get a little extra help."\nOther winners this year included serious academics whose work appeals to our non-serious side: scientists who discovered unusual developments in the brains of London cab drivers, psychologists who found that people have simplified views of politicians' personalities and Stockholm University researchers who published a report called "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans."\nWe sometimes criticize academic research for being too esoteric, and to be sure, the mere mention of, say, ergodic theory or hermeneutic phenomenology is probably enough to make most people's eyes glaze over. But all research isn't boring and pointless, so let's enjoy whatever charmingly quirky research we find. \nWhat's more, quirky research can even have useful applications. England's $2.5 billion biscuit (cookie) industry is forced to throw away thousands of cracked or broken biscuits each year, but biscuit companies may be able to save money and (perhaps more importantly) cookies by learning from a study of why the cookie crumbles (Reuters, Thursday). The report, entitled "A novel application of speckle interferometry for the measurement of strain distributions in semi-sweet biscuits," concludes that the main problem is humidity. \n Researcher Ricky Wildman explained to the BBC, Thursday: "If the humidity of the atmosphere is set incorrectly, some parts of the biscuit are trying to dry out while some parts of the biscuit are trying to suck moisture in. Certain parts are contracting, others are expanding. This sets up internal forces within the biscuit and it effectively self-destructs."\nWildman compares the process to "an earthquake running through the biscuit." He adds, "It's very exciting."\nAmen. Knowledge can be very exciting and off-beat and meaningful, all at the same time. It can be more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Who knows? It could even involve an actual barrel of monkeys.