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."
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.
