Hamsters on Viagra take centre stage at Ig Nobel awards

Scientists who discovered that Viagra helps hamsters overcome jet-lag and managed to extract vanilla flavouring from cow dung took centre stage today 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 science humour
magazine Annals of Improbable Research to highlight scientific
papers that, in the words of the magazine, "first make people laugh
and then make them think".

Among the winners were a British-US 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 an
apparently endless bowl of soup.

Also honoured was a Taiwanese man who patented a device to net
bank robbers.

The prestigious peace prize was given to a US 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.

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.