Can country music drive you to suicide?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC521600/

BMJ. 2004 Oct 9
Can country music drive you to suicide?

The Ig Nobel award for medicine—one of the prizes given annually to scientists who have produced unusual research—was given this year to a team of researchers who had found that cities in which radio stations played a higher than average amount of country music had higher than average suicide rates…

“We had hard data showing that cities with higher than average country music radio market share had higher white suicide rates,” he said. African-American suicide rates, he explained, were not affected by the country music market (Social Forces 1992;71: 211-8)…

A biology award went to Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science and his colleagues who discovered that herring allegedly communicate by breaking wind…

Jillian Clarke, of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, won the public health award for her tests of the scientific validity of the “five second rule,” which says that if food dropped on the floor is left for only five seconds, it is safe to eat. Ms Clarke, 17 years old and the youngest Ig Nobel recipient ever, dropped food on all sorts of surfaces at the University of Illinois and then tested the food for bacteria…

The Literature Award went to the American Nudist Research Library of Kissimmee, Florida, “for preserving nudist history so that everyone can see it.” Pamela Chestek, accepting the award on behalf of her mother, told the audience that the library’s board members wanted to attend but found they “had nothing to wear.” …

The Coca-Cola Company of Great Britain won the chemistry award for invention of its Dasani brand of “pure” bottled water—which turned out to be tap water.

The clear winner of the night, however, was the recipient of this year’s peace prize, Daisuke Inoue of Hyugo, Japan. Mr Inoue, who invented the karaoke machine, received this year’s peace award for “providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize

The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research.

The stated aim of the prizes is to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think”. The awards are sometimes veiled criticism (or gentle satire), but are also used to point out that even the most absurd-sounding avenues of research can yield useful knowledge. Organized by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they are presented by a group that includes Nobel laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater, and they are followed by a set of public lectures by the winners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…