You may already be a weiner!
This year's Ig Nobel Prizes have just been announced. I'm glad to know that, finally, our country is doing something to promote the cause of world peace.
The winners
Medicine: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, for their report in the British Medical Journal, Sword Swallowing and its Side-Effects
Physics: L Mahadevan of Harvard and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Santiago University, Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled
Biology: Johanna van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, for a census of the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds
Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanilla essence from cow dung
Linguistics: Juant Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Barcelona University, for showing that rats cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards
Literature: Glenda Browne of Australia, for her study of the word "the" and the problems it causes when indexing
Peace: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, for instigating research on a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other
Nutrition: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup
Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taiwan, for patenting a device that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them
Aviation: Patricia V Agostino, Santiago A Plano and Diego A Golombek of Argentina, for the discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/oct/05/1
The winners
Medicine: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, for their report in the British Medical Journal, Sword Swallowing and its Side-Effects
Physics: L Mahadevan of Harvard and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Santiago University, Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled
Biology: Johanna van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, for a census of the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds
Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanilla essence from cow dung
Linguistics: Juant Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Barcelona University, for showing that rats cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards
Literature: Glenda Browne of Australia, for her study of the word "the" and the problems it causes when indexing
Peace: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, for instigating research on a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other
Nutrition: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup
Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taiwan, for patenting a device that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them
Aviation: Patricia V Agostino, Santiago A Plano and Diego A Golombek of Argentina, for the discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/oct/05/1