An Australian researcher found that many areas that supposedly produce lots of centenarians also produce shoddy record-keeping.

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. This week's issue is written by Julia Bergin.

Five years ago, Saul Newman published what he thought was groundbreaking research about "blue zones" -- places like Okinawa in Japan and Sardinia in Italy, where many people reputedly lead astonishingly lengthy and healthy lives. These areas have long inspired envy, curiosity and dietary fads. And many scientists have tried to understand how some people can live well past 100 in good health.

Dr. Newman, who was a postdoctoral researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra at the time, did not discover a secret elixir for human longevity. His conclusion, in essence, was that blue zones do not exist. In many of these places, he found, shoddy record-keeping of vital statistics like births and deaths undermined previous research suggesting that people there lived unusually long lives.

He made some headlines but found no traction in the scientific community. His paper has not been peer reviewed or published, which Dr. Newman said was for the "rather obvious reason" that it showed a substantial amount of existing demographic research to be "bunk."

"In a sign of the levels of gate-keeping that is ongoing, I am currently attempting to overcome nine peer reviewers at a public health journal," said Dr. Newman, who now works at Oxford University's Institute of Population Aging. "It's been spectacularly ignored," he added.

That may be about to change.

On Thursday, Dr. Newman was one of 10 individuals and teams awarded an Ig Nobel Prize at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, near Boston. Started in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, the editor of the magazine "Annals of Improbable Research," the Ig Nobels honor what their founder says are "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think."

Other winners this year included a decades-old study by the American psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner, who died in 1990, on whether pigeons can guide missiles kamikaze-style (the U.S. Army's verdict: Yes). His daughter Julie Skinner Vargas accepted the award on his behalf on Thursday and said it was a relief his "most important contribution" to science had finally been acknowledged.