The inventor of artificial testicles for dogs, Nigerian Internet scammers and a team that calculated the pressures created when penguins poop won this year's Ig Nobel prizes on Thursday.
The spoof prizes, awarded by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, are presented at a ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the winners must try to explain their work in a minute or less.
While some awards clearly poke fun at current culture, others are meant to provoke debate about science, Annals editor Marc Abrahams said.
"Now in their fifteenth year, the Igs honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think," Abrahams said.
The Ig Nobel Prizes were handed to the winners by genuine Nobel laureates Dudley Herschbach (1986 Chemistry), William Lipscomb (1976 Chemistry), Robert Wilson (1978 Physics) and Sheldon Glashow (1979 Physics).
Harvard professor Roy Glauber, awarded a Nobel Prize in physics, has been a regular at the Ig Nobels for 10 years, sweeping paper airplanes thrown on the stage during the ceremony.
This year's winners include Gregg Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing Neuticles -- artificial replacement testicles for dogs.
Miller mortgaged his home and maxed out his credit cards to mass produce his invention -- prosthetic testicles for neutered dogs.
What started 10 years ago with an experiment on an unwitting Rottweiler named Max has turned into a thriving mail-order business.
Miller has sold more than 150,000 of his Neuticles, more than doubling his US$500,000 investment. The silicone implants come in different sizes, shapes, weights and degrees of firmness.
And on Thursday night Miller's efforts earned him a dubious yet strangely coveted honor: the Ig Nobel Prize for medicine.
The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria won in the Literature category, "for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters -- General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon Mbeki." The scams are notorious for asking people to reveal their private bank information to help fictitious characters transfer large sums of money.
Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany, and the University of Oulu, Finland; and Jozsef Gal of Lorond Eotvos University in Hungary won in the fluid dynamics category, for Pressures produced when penguins pooh -- calculations on avian defaecation, an actual study published in 2003 in the journal Polar Biology.
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