TED搞笑诺贝尔奖 演讲稿

0:15George and Charlotte Blonsky, who were a married couple living in the Bronx in New York City,invented something. They got a patent in 1965 for what they call, "a device to assist women in giving birth." This device consists of a large, round table and some machinery. When the woman is ready to deliver her child, she lies on her back, she is strapped down to the table, and the table is rotated at high speed. The child comes flying out through centrifugal force. If you look at their patent carefully,especially if you have any engineering background or talent, you may decide that you see one or two points where the design is not perfectly adequate. (Laughter)

1:17Doctor Ivan Schwab in California is one of the people, one of the main people, who helped answer the question, "Why don't woodpeckers get headaches?" And it turns out the answer to that is because their brains are packaged inside their skulls in a way different from the way our brains, we being human beings, true, have our brains packaged. They, the woodpeckers, typically will peck, they will bang their head on a piece of wood thousands of times every day. Every day! And as far as anyone knows, that doesn't bother them in the slightest. 1:56How does this happen? Their brain does not slosh around like ours does. Their brain is packed in very tightly, at least for blows coming right from the front. Not too many people paid attention to this research until the last few years when, in this country especially, people are becoming

curious about what happens to the brains of football players who bang their heads repeatedly. And the woodpecker maybe relates to that.

2:26There was a paper published in the medical journal The Lancet in England a few years ago called " A man who pricked his finger and smelled putrid for 5 years." Dr. Caroline Mills and her team received this patient and didn't really know what to do about it. The man had cut his finger, he worked processing chickens, and then he started to smell really, really bad. So bad that when he got in a roomwith the doctors and the nurses, they couldn't stand being in the room with him. It was intolerable. They tried every drug, every other treatment they could think of. After a year, he still smelled putrid. After two years, still smelled putrid. Three years, four years, still smelled putrid. After five years, it went away on its own. It's a mystery.

3:16In New Zealand, Dr. Lianne Parkin and her team tested an old tradition in her city. They live in a city that has huge hills, San Francisco-grade hills. And in the winter there, it gets very cold and very icy.There are lots of injuries. The tradition that they tested, they tested by asking people who were on their way to work in the morning, to stop and try something out. Try one of two conditions. The tradition is that in the winter, in that city, you wear your socks on the outside of your boots. And what they discovered by experiment, and it was quite graphic when they saw it, was that it's true. That if you wear your socks on the outside rather