'Gay bomb' scoops Ig Nobel award
Pioneering research into a "gay bomb" that makes enemy troops "sexually
irresistible" to each other has scooped one of this year's Ig Nobel Prizes.
Other winners included work on treating hamster jetlag with impotency
drugs, extracting vanilla from cow dung, and the side-effects of sword
swallowing.
The awards, founded in 1991, mark achievements that "first make people
laugh, and then make them think".
The prize ceremony took place at Harvard University, US.
Genuine Nobel Laureates handed out the much-coveted awards to the winners,
who took away no cash, but instead received a hand-made prize, a
certificate, and, of course, the glory of such an illustrious win.
Sword effects
Dan Meyer, executive director of Sword Swallowing Association
International and an author of the British Medical Journal paper Sword
Swallowing and its Side-Effects, said: "I was surprised and extremely
honoured when I found out I was not only nominated for an Ig Nobel prize
but that I had won it. I couldn't believe it."
He told the BBC News website that the study revealed that when
professional sword swallowers ingested a single sword very carefully, it
did not do much harm, but swallowing many swords, strangely shaped blades,
or being distracted when swallowing, could cause injury.
The findings also suggested that sword swallowers should not swallow
swords if they already had a sore throat, he said.
Unfortunately, said the organisers, nobody from the US military who
carried out the research on chemicals that could prompt homosexual
dalliances amongst rival troops (a research project called Harassing,
Annoying and "Bad Guy" Identifying Chemicals) attended the ceremony
because the study's authors could not be tracked down.
Real research
The Ig Nobel Prizes were created by the Annals of Improbable Research
(AIR), a science magazine.
The awards, now in their 17th year, are intended to "celebrate the
unusual, honour the imaginative - and spur people's interest in science,
medicine and technology".
Marc Abrahams, the editor of AIR, told the BBC News website: "When I
became the editor of a science magazine, suddenly I was meeting all kinds
of people who had done things that were hard to describe, and for the most
part, nobody had ever heard of.
"For some of them, it seemed a great shame that nobody would give them any
kind of recognition, and that was what really led to the birth of the Ig
Nobels."
Like their more sober counterpart, the Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobels are
split into several categories and all research is real and published.
2007 Ig Nobel Winners
Medicine - Brain Witcombe, of Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust,
UK, and Dan Meyer for their probing work on the health consequences of
swallowing a sword.
Physics - A US-Chile team who ironed out the problem of how sheets become
wrinkled.
Biology - Dr Johanna van Bronswijk of the Netherlands for carrying out a
creepy crawly census of all of the mites, insects, spiders, ferns and
fungi that share our beds.
Chemistry - Mayu Yamamoto, from Japan, for developing a method to extract
vanilla fragrance and flavouring from cow dung.
Linguistics - A University of Barcelona team for showing that rats are
unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards
and somebody speaking Dutch backwards.
Literature - Glenda Browne of Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of
the word "the", and how it can flummox those trying to put things into
alphabetical order.
Peace - The US Air Force Wright Laboratory for instigating research and
development on a chemical weapon that would provoke widespread homosexual
behaviour among enemy troops.
Nutrition - Brian Wansink of Cornell University for investigating the
limits of human appetite by feeding volunteers a self-refilling,
"bottomless" bowl of soup.
Economics - Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taiwan for patenting a device that can
catch bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
Aviation - A National University of Quilmes, Argentina, team for
discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters to recover from jet lag.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7026150.stm
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