Award winning: The Ig Nobel "for Aviation" was won by Argentinian researchers who showed that administering a hamster-sized dose of Viagra helped the rodents recover more quickly from laboratory-induced jet lag.
Credit: iStockphoto
CAMBRIDGE, USA: Researchers who discovered that Viagra helps hamsters overcome jet-lag and managed to extract vanilla flavouring from cow dung take centre stage at the 17th annual Ig Nobel Awards.
The awards – a tongue-in-cheek homage to their Scandinavian counterparts – were announced during a raucous ceremony at Harvard University in Massachusetts to honour some of the more obscure and bizarre scientific discoveries.
The Igs, as they are known, are chosen by the Annals of Improbable Research – a Harvard-published, science humour magazine – to highlight scientific papers that, "first make people laugh and then make them think."
Laugh, then think
Among the winners awarded at Thursday's ceremony were a British-U.S. duo who examined the side effects of sword swallowing and a Spanish team who finally answered the question of whether rats can discriminate between Japanese and Dutch spoken backwards.
"It was a surprise, it was the last thing we expected," said Nuria Sebastian-Galles, one of the Barcelona team of scientists, of the findings. The awards, she said, "bring out the freak inside most scientists."
Past winners have included the creator of the plastic pink flamingo, the inventor of an alarm clock that runs and hides and a researcher who reported the first known case of homosexual necrophiliac behaviour in the mallard duck.
Research highlighted by this year's awards ranged from a study of how sheets wrinkle and how the word "the" causes headaches for indexes, to why humans can't stop eating when presented with apparently endless bowls of soup. Also honoured was a Taiwanese man who patented a device to capture bank robbers.
The prestigious Ig Nobel peace prize was given to a U.S. Air Force laboratory for researching what the committee dubbed the "gay bomb" – a chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.
"Please stop, I'm bored."
Japanese researcher Mayu Yamamoto, who received the chemistry Ig, got an additional honour: a local ice cream shop created a new flavour, the "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist," to honour her work extracting vanilla flavour from cow dung.
The winners were permitted just 60 seconds to give their acceptance speeches, on pain of interruption by an eight-year-old girl, who traditionally signals the time limit by repeatedly shouting: "Please stop, I'm bored."
The Ig Nobels have often targeted what are perceived to be wasteful projects and some scientists have complained that the satirical awards unfairly tarnish legitimate research. However, many researchers welcome the chance to talk about their work.
Seven of the 10 winners this year paid their own way to accept their awards, which were handed out by six real Nobel Laureates.
Winners will also explain their work and why they did what they did in a weekend public lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also in Cambridge.
