7 Oct 2010

Study on preventing winter falls wins an Ig Nobel Award

From Our Changing World, 9:50 pm on 7 October 2010

The Ig Nobel Awards

Congratulations to University of Otago researchers Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest for winning the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes. Their award was for a paper published in the New Zealand Medical Journal (vol 22 no. 1298, July 3 2009) 'Preventing Winter Falls: a randomised controlled trial of a novel intervention'. The Ig Nobel Awards 'honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative - and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.'

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