Every once in a while, an invention will come along that changes everything. Unfortunately, rarely does that invention come from Japan. More often than not, Japanese inventions walk the line of being helpful for something extremely specific and being completely useless. But God bless ‘em, those Japanese scientists keep churning out these inventions year after year.
Recently, a group of Japanese were recognized for their outstanding work in the field of strange inventions. The infamous Ig Nobel Prize awarded these Japanese inventors for their work on a smoke detector that spews wasabi.
What Is The Ig Nobel Prize?
The Ig Nobel Prize is an annual prize awarded to inventions “that make people laugh then make them think.” These are inventions that won’t necessarily change the world as we know it or cure cancer, but are interesting in their own right in the ways they solve specific, niche problems. In short: this award was basically something created for wacky Japanese scientists like Dr. NakaMats.
The Prize is awarded for lots of different categories which vary from year to year including the typical Nobel Prize categories like peace, literature, and chemistry; but the Ig Nobel Prize can also award prizes for oddly specific categories like public safety, veterinary medicine, and aviation.
The Ig Nobel Prize award ceremony itself is pretty goofy. The Prizes are given away by actual Nobel Laureates, but that’s about the extent of the ceremony’s seriousness. Wacky rituals and running gags punctuate the ceremony, including barrages of paper airplanes flying at the stage and sword swallowing.
Japanese Domination
Not surprisingly, tons of previous winners have been Japanese; you could even say that the Japanese are building a dynasty of Ig Nobel Prize winners. Last year’s Japanese winners were scientists who determined that slime can be used to map out railroad tracks. 2009′s Japanese scientists discovered that kitchen garbage can be shrunk down using bacteria derived from panda poop. The list goes on.
And yes, Dr. NakaMats actually did win an Ig Nobel Prize in 2005 for photographing and analyzing every meal he’s eaten in the last 30 years, a contribution to modern nutrition that won’t soon be forgotten.
The Wasabi Smoke Detector
The Wasabi Smoke Detector won this year’s Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry. So what makes this particular invention so great? Not only was it an achievement for the scientists to get the wasabi to the right consistency to be sprayed out from the smoke detector, but the invention has uses you might not have thought about: it’s a fantastic solution for deaf people who wouldn’t be able to hear a typical fire alarm.
One of the scientists who worked on the project said this upon receiving the prize:
This prize is a gift from the subjects who slept in the examination room and had been choked with [the] pungent smell [that caused] tears and coughing. I do appreciate their courage and cooperation.
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