Hammy Viagra Wins IgNobel
It’s that time of the year again. Our buddies over at the Annals of Improbable Research have been ferreting around the backwaters of international research to find the strangest science projects known to man. And they haven’t disappointed.
This year’s winners are drawn from across the spectrum and include research into the side-effects of sword swallowing, the production of vanilla flavouring from cow pats and use of impotency drugs to treat jet lag in hamsters.
However, our favourite is the team from the US Air Force Wright Laboratory who researched the possibility of a gay bomb. That’s right, a chemical weapon that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour in enemy forces. The project was proposed back in 1994; sadly after years of research the project has now been dropped by the US military. (see the declassified report)The IgNobel awards are issued in good spirit and are designed to "first make people laugh, and then make them think". Quite what people might think, however, is another matter.
Here’s the list of winners in full:
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Peace – Top secret personnel (US Air Force Wright Laboratory): for attempting to develop a “gay bomb”. |
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Chemistry - Mayu Yamamoto (International Medical Center of Japan): for developing a method to produce synthetic vanilla from cow dung. (Yamamoto thought turning pats into "vanilla" would cut into Japan's cow dung mountain.) |
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Biology - (Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands): a census of all of the mites, insects, spiders, ferns and fungi that share our beds. |
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Physics - L. Mahadevan (Harvard University, US) and Enrique Cerda Villablanca (Universidad de Santiago, Chile): the mathematical formulation of the problem of wrinkled bed sheets. |
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Medicine – Brain Witcombe (Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, UK) and Dan Meyer (Sword Swallowing Association International): the health consequences of swallowing a sword. |
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Economics - Kuo Cheng Hsieh (Taiwan): for patenting a device that can catch bank robbers by dropping a net over them. |
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Aviation - Patricia Agostino, Santiago Plano and Diego Golombek (National University of Quilmes, Argentina): for discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters to recover from jet lag. |
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Nutrition - Brian Wansink (Cornell University, US): for using a "bottomless" bowl of soup to show that people will eat more when they are presented with more food. |
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Literature - Glenda Browne (Blue Mountains, Australia): for her study of how word "the" causes trouble for people trying to alphabetise things. |
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Linguistics - Juan Toro, Josep Trobalon, and Núria Sebastián-Gallés (University of Barcelona): for finding that rats can recognise differences between Dutch and Japanese sentences, but not if the words were played backwards. |
More great articles from Null Hypothesis, the Journal of Unlikely Science:
- New solutions - Global warming fixed
- New research - Gummy bears to save the day
- New moves - Robo-Einstein busts a groove
- New diet - The Justice Diet
Title image: Robert Red2000
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