CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Topeka High School and University of KIansas alumni Craig Bennett, Corpus Christi, Texas, and his colleagues have received the Ig Nobel Prize given to scientific results that are laughable, pointless or silly. And Bennett tells the Topeka Capital-Journal that he’s happy to receive one of the satirical awards, which are handed out the same week the Nobel Prizes are awarded.. While he was a researcher at Dartmouth, Bennett bought an Atlantic salmon to be used to train students in using a brain scanner called a functional magnetic resonance imaging. Before they used the scanner on teenagers, the students used the scanner on the dead fish, showing the salmon photos of humans in social situations while scanning the fish’s brain. However, later when one his researchers glanced at a few of the scans, they were surprised to see that some scans showed that the zombie fish’s brain was still active. Bennett said that given enough scans and the right circumstances, the FMRIs will produce false positives – even brain activity in dead fish. The team published the results of the scan as a way to alert other researchers using the scanners to follow proper procedures to eliminate statistical errors. It also attracted attention from others, including the Ig Noble Committee. Bennett also offers a non-scientific conclusion to his research. When properly baked, salmon is quite tasty.
Monday, Oct. 8, 4 p.m.
