Canadian who helped design splash-free urinal is proud of his weird science award

University of Waterloo PhD student Kaveeshan Thurairajah isn’t exactly a Nobel laureate. But he is an Ig Nobel laureate.

The Ig Nobels, a fun-filled parody of the Nobel Prizes, celebrate the most unusual and imaginative research that academia has to offer. 

Thurairajah and his colleagues won this year’s Ig Nobel Physics Prize for their “theoretical and experimental attempts to design a splash-free urinal.” 

He remembers the moment his supervisor, fluid physicist Zhao Pan, told him the good news. 

“[He asked], ‘Hypothetically, if you had won the Ig Nobels, would you be happy? Would you be offended? How would you feel?’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I’d be really happy,'” Thurairajah told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

“And he’s like, ‘OK, that’s a good answer, because we did win.’ And he just pulled a bottle of wine out of his cupboard in his office, and we drank them out of espresso cups.”

‘Anatomically accurate pee machine’

The award-winning scientists built and tested a handful of urinal prototypes in their quest to find the perfect, slash-free design, including the low and slender Nautilus (pronounced naughty-LOO), and the high and angular Cornocopia (pronounced corno-co-PEE-ah).

“Nautilus is the ideal one because it covers not only the reduced splash, but it is significantly easier to clean than the Cornucopia design,” Thurairajah said.

Thurairajah and his colleagues showed up at the awards ceremony in Zurich on Thursday clad in bright yellow raincoats, ready to be showered with adulations from their fellow oddball scientists.

But he insists that nobody was splashed with actual pee in the course of their work.

“It would not be hygienic to test it ourselves, but … more importantly, it’s not scientific. I will not pee at the same rate every time, so it’s difficult to compare tests,” he said.

“So we started by reading into a list of, I guess, flow rates that are typically observed in human males, and we then proceeded to build an anatomically accurate pee machine.”

While he embraces the silliness of it all, Thurairajah says the urinal research has real public value.

“If we’re able to …  make bathrooms more inviting, public spaces more inviting, that’s, like, a good thing for society,” he said. 

The findings were published last year in the journal PNAS Nexus.

Canadians study stealing candy from kids, mosquito nose printers

The Waterloo physicists weren’t the only Canadians honoured at the awards ceremony on Thursday.

A team that included University of Toronto researchers won the Economics Prize for “amassing evidence that upper class people are more likely to snatch from a children’s supply of candy, and engage in other kinds of unethical behavior.” 

McGill University scientists were part of the team that won the Technology Prize for “pioneering the use of mosquito proboscises as high-resolution 3D printing nozzles.”

Other researchers took home prizes for reconstructing the evolutionary history of kissing, investigating the science of blowing one’s nose, and burying 1,000 pairs of underwear in more than 25 countries to study how critters in the soil helped them decompose.

The awards, organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, have shifted to Europe after 35 years in the United States over concerns about attendees being able to get visas.

Thurairajah — whose urinal-designing colleagues include researchers from China, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia — says it was the right call.

“The scientific community is fundamentally an international one, and we benefit and we contribute to each other from across the globe,” he said.

“I’d really hate to be somewhere where fellow award winners or previous winners would not be able to attend. I feel like that’d almost be sort of a betrayal to them.”