with the Ekon doing so many silly things, why?? why?? Friday, October 5, 2007 - Page updated at 02:02 AM
"Gay bomb" and other Ig Nobel Prize winners By Seattle Times news services BOSTON — The inventor of a method to extract vanilla fragrance from cow dung, military developers of a chemical "gay bomb" and a team that researched how sheets become wrinkled won Ig Nobel Prizes for 2007. The annual prizes, awarded by the science-humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, were presented Thursday night at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. While some awards poke fun at popular culture, others are meant to provoke debate, honoring achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think," according to the magazine. "These people really ought to have someone, somewhere, in some tiny way, give some kind of recognition that they have done something nobody has ever done," Annals editor Marc Abrahams said. The Ig Nobel Prizes, in their 17th year, were handed to the winners by genuine Nobel laureates Craig Mello (medicine 2006), Dudley Herschbach (chemistry 1986), Robert Laughlin (physics 1998), William Lipscomb (chemistry 1976) and Sheldon Glashow (physics 1979). This year's winners: • Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin, or vanilla fragrance and flavoring, from cow dung. • Linguistics: A University of Barcelona team for a study showing rats sometimes fail to distinguish between a person speaking Japanese backward and a person speaking Dutch backward. • Peace Prize: The Air Force Wright Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, for instigating research and development of a chemical weapon, the "gay bomb," that "will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other." • Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device in 2001 that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them. • Medicine: Brain Witcombe, of Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, and sword swallower Dan Meyer, of Antioch, Tenn., for their insightful work on the health consequences of swallowing a sword. • Physics: A U.S.-Chilean team that ironed out the problem of how sheets become wrinkled. • Biology: Johanna van Bronswijk of the Netherlands for carrying out a creepy-crawly census of all of the mites, insects, spiders, ferns and fungi that share our beds. • Literature: Glenda Browne of Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of "the," and how it can flummox those trying to put things into alphabetical order. • Nutrition: Brian Wansink of Cornell University for investigating the limits of human appetite by feeding volunteers a self-refilling, "bottomless" bowl of soup. • Aviation: A National University of Quilmes, Argentina, team for discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters recover from jet lag. Compiled from Reuters and The Associated Press Copyright (c) 2007 The Seattle Times Company -- Jim Devine / "The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous." -- Naomi Klein.
