Scientists who discovered that Viagra helps hamsters overcome jet lag and a Japanese researcher who extracted vanilla flavoring from cow dung won top honors on Thursday at the 17th annual Ig Nobel Awards.
The awards, a tongue-in-cheek homage to their Scandinavian counterparts, were announced at a raucous ceremony at Harvard University in Massachusetts that shone a bright light on obscure and often bizarre research and inventions.
The Igs, as they are known, are chosen by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine to highlight scientific achievements that, in the words of editor Marc Abrahams, "first make people laugh and then make them think."
PHOTO: AFP
Among the winners were a British-US duo for a penetrating report on the effects of sword swallowing and a Spain-based team who answered the question of whether rats can discriminate between Japanese and Dutch spoken backwards.
The awards "bring out the freak inside most scientists," said Nuria Sebastian-Galles, one of the Barcelona team of scientists.
Seven of the 10 winners this year paid their own way to accept the awards, which were handed out by six real Nobel Prize winners.
Although pelted by paper airplanes, as per tradition, each winner expressed delight at receiving the small trophies affixed with a chicken and an egg.
Some scientists have complained that the satirical awards unfairly tarnish legitimate research. Others say a sense of fun humanizes scientists.
"I don't take it as an insult at all," said Brian Witcome, a British radiologist who won the medicine prize for his sword-swallowing research."Humor adds to research."
His co-author, US scientist Dan Meyer even gulped down a short sword before thanking the whooping crowd with the hilt between his teeth.
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 cannot stop eating when presented with an apparently endless bowl of soup.
Some winners tried to explain their research, but if they talked for more than 60 seconds they were interrupted by an eight-year-old girl who repeatedly intoned: "Please stop, I'm bored."
Diego Golombek, the Argentine who found the cure for hamster jet lag, thanked his assistants "for going to the store to get the Viagra for us."
Also honored was Hsieh Kuo-cheng, a Taiwanese who patented a device to net bank robbers, but who could not attend the ceremony because he has apparently vanished.
"Somebody suggested to us the possibility that maybe the poor man was trapped inside his own machine," Abrahams said.
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