Research into stinky feet, a study on the sound of fingernails on a blackboard and a device that repels teenagers with an annoying high-pitched hum on Thursday won IgNobel prizes -- the humorous counterpart to this week's Nobel prizes.
Other winning research included a US and Israeli team's discovery that hiccups could be cured with a finger up the rectum and a study into why woodpeckers do not get headaches.
"The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology," said Marc Abrahams, editor of the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, which sponsors the awards together with the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.
All the research is real and has been published in established scientific and medical journals. However, unlike the Nobel prizes awarded this week by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, IgNobel winners receive no money, little recognition and have virtually no hope of transforming science or medicine.
But they received their awards from real Nobel winners in an event broadcast on the Internet (www.improbable.com) on Thursday evening.
The two-hour ceremony was geek-turned-chic as scientists traded their labcoats for tuxedoes and roared with laughter whenever someone uttered the word "inertia" -- the evening's theme.
Ivan Schwab of the University of California Davis and the late Philip May of the University of California Los Angeles received the ornithology prize for their pioneering work on the ability of the humble woodpecker to avoid head injury.
Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, took home the nutrition prize for showing that dung beetles are in fact finicky eaters.
Winners had one minute to deliver acceptance speeches, with the time limit strictly policed by an outspoken eight-year-old girl.
Audience members bucked new security regulations intended to curb an IgNobel tradition: throwing paper aeroplanes. Over the course of the event hundreds were hurled at the stage, where Harvard physicist Roy Glauber dutifully swept them up, as he has for the last 10 years.
Glauber joined the ranks of Nobel laureates last year but still insisted on retaining his sweeping duties for the 16th annual ceremony this year.
Despite the gala's irreverent tone, the awards are taken increasingly seriously in the scientific community, with eight of the 10 winners this year paying their own way to attend the ceremony.
One of those unable to attend the ceremony for family reasons was Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, who was awarded the peace prize for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant.
The device makes an annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults. He later used the same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers.
Three US scientists, Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand, won the acoustics prize for experiments to learn why people hate the sound of fingernails on a blackboard.
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