The wackiest of them all

By J.P.

LAST week Babbage picked a handful of nominees who would vie for the honour of the most bizarre bit of boffinry and the wackiest widget to have featured on the pages of The Economist over the course of 2010. After prolonged deliberation and a wholly unscientific straw poll among the nerdier elements of The Economist's staff, he can at last announce which are the quirkiest of them all. And so, without further ado, here are the results.

The bizarre boffinry prize goes to Nick Neave of Northumbria University in Britain for having the brain wave to pin down exactly what it is about a dance that appeals to members of the opposite sex. Dr Neave bedecked a group of students with motion-capture sensors of the sort used to bring life to digital characters in films like "Avatar". A constant drum beat was provided and the students were asked to dance, but not told how.

The motion-capture data were then used to animate a humanoid avatar that was featureless and gender-neutral. Next, heterosexual women were asked to judge the quality of the dancing. The moves they found most attractive proved to be those that had variability and amplitude in the head, neck and trunk (so head-banging, for instance, doesn't work because its amplitude may be large, but it lacks variability). Most intriguingly, perhaps, the speed of movement of the right knee also appeared to be statistically important in signalling dance quality.

To give credit were it is due, Dr Neave's bid for the inaugural award was lent a hand by our science correspondent, who helpfully began the article with the following titbits from the book of nature:

THE need to identify a suitable mate is such a strong biological urge that the animal kingdom has spawned a bewildering array of courtship rituals. Hippo males fling their faeces; flatworms have penis-jousting contests; and humpback whales sing and leap above the ocean surface.

Weird all round, then. And for those who are not yet convinced, here are the dancing avatars in their virtual flesh, courtesy of the Royal Society.

The contest in the science category was a close one. Hot on the heels of dancing avatars came research which demonstrated that electoral victory makes voters who had plumbed for the winners more likely to scour the web for porn. On the technological front, meanwhile, the jurors were nearly unanimous in awarding the wackiest widget prize to the cheese-powered fuel cell.

Georgia Antonopoulou, a biochemical engineer at the University of Patras, Greece, says that lactose, a sugar found in whey, a by-product of cheese-making, can be consumed by cultures of bacteria contained within a fuel cell to generate an electric current. Microbial fuel cells, as devices that rely on bacterial input are known, are attracting more attention. Traditionally, fuel cells work best with a refined fuel containing synthetic sugars, such as glucose. Dr Antonopoulou has shown that, using a culture of bacteria procured from her local waste-water plant, it is possible to get almost as much power from raw whey as from refined fuel, provided the whey is diluted. True, the power output still only amounts to milliwatts, barely enough to trickle-charge a cellphone. But the imaginative leap has been taken; the rest is less glamorous (at least as criteria for this award go) incremental toil.

Congratulations to both winners. Babbage will be on the lookout for another crop of weird but wonderful science and technology in 2011. There are sure to be plenty of hopefuls.