Pass the wasabi
14 Mar 2012, 15:59 UTC
It's not every day that you spot an Ig Nobel laureate in Bristol market
By Margaret Harris
Courtesy: iStockphoto.com/SensorSpot
Bristol's St Nicholas Market is an eclectic place, packed with hole-in-the-wall restaurants and shops selling everything from novelty T-shirts and herbal remedies to sheet music and sewing supplies. Today, however, it was even more eclectic than usual, since one of the customers at the curry house was Makoto Imai, the Japanese psychiatrist who won an Ig Nobel prize in 2011 for his role in inventing a wasabi-based smoke alarm.
Imai was accompanied by Ig Nobel organizer Marc Abrams, a friend of Physics World whom I met at a scientific conference back in 2009. They're touring the UK right now as part of National Science and Engineering Week, putting on a show about the Ig prizes and other examples of science that – as Abrams explained to the slightly bemused Bristolian who shared our table at lunch – "first makes you laugh, and then makes you think".
The wasabi smoke alarm is a good example. Wasabi is Japanese horseradish, otherwise known as that deceptively mild-looking green paste that comes with sushi. As anyone who has ever tasted it will know, a little ...
