Whacky research praised
A study on hamsters and Viagra took home the physics prize
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Friday, 05, Oct 2007 05:41
Research on gay bombs, sword-swallowing side effects and how sheets wrinkle are included in the list of scientific papers singled out for an Ig Noble award.
The Ig Nobles are a parody of the Nobel prize and are given to research in ten topics that "make people laugh and then think".
This year's winners were announced at a ceremony last night in the subject areas of medicine, physics, biology, chemistry, linguistics, literature, peace, nutrition, economics and aviation.
Taking the medicine prize at the 17th first annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony at Harvard University's were Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their report "Sword swallowing and its side effects".
Research that discovered Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters took home the aviation award while the study of how sheets wrinkle earned the physics prize.
By far one of the most unusual research topics - quite a feat considering the list of winners - was the peace prize-wining study on whether the so-called "gay bomb" chemical weapon could make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.
Full list of winners
Medicine: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA for their report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."
Physics: L Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
Biology: Professor Dr Johanna E M H van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.
Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin - vanilla fragrance and flavouring - from cow dung.
Linguistics: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
Literature: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" - and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.
Peace: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon - the so-called "gay bomb" - that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.
Nutrition: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.
Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
Aviation: Patricia V Agostino, Santiago A Plano and Diego A Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.