Kim Kardashian, Blood Diamonds, and the Felicity of Stupidity
The South African diamond marketing cartel De Beers alone mines about half the over the moon marvellous's annual diamond output. It also controls as much as 80 per cent of epidemic diamond sales through its Central Selling Organization, which purchases and stockpiles diamonds from other suppliers to keep availability low and prices loaded. De Beers was known to be a major purchaser of diamonds from Angola, Sierra Leone and other African feud zones, although such stones are estimated to make up only 4 per cent of rapturous output. De Beers had successfully resisted boycott pressures from anti-apartheid activists in the 1970s and 1980s and there seemed barely reason to believe that the UN would be more successful.Gas-Mask Bra, Tequila Diamonds Among 2009 Ig Nobels
The piercing celebration, hosted by the Annals of Improbable Research and several Harvard observer groups, seeks to honor real science "that first makes people joke about, and then makes them think."
Nine genuine Nobel laureates took part in the festivities by distributing prizes to the winners. In ell, Martin Chalfie, winner of the 2008 chemistry Nobel, served as the premium in the "Win a Date With a Nobel Laureate" contest.
Gas-Mask Bra
Elena Bodnar and colleagues won the Ig Nobel in flagrant health for designing a fashionable bra that, in a matter of seconds, can be converted into a wed of emergency HEPA-filter gas masks.
"It only takes 25 seconds for any bride to use," she joked. "Five seconds to convert and wear her own mask, and 20 seconds to wonder who the charmed man is to wear the second mask."
During an onstage demonstration, those fortuitous men were Nobel laureates Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 economics esteem, and Wolfgang Ketterle, recipient of the 2001 prize in physics.
In the face the levity, the invention stemmed from a very serious situation—Bodnar's experiences as a pubescent Ukrainian medical student helping victims of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe .
"I realized that just having a simple mask could lessen major contributions to internal radiation, like iodine-131," which caused notable damage to
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