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ON THE WEB: THE IG NOBEL PRIZES

by Hazed

The winners of the 2007 Ig Nobel prizes have just been announced, and there's some great winners this year.

The Ig Nobel prizes are intended to "celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative, and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology." They mark achievements that "first make people laugh, then make them think". The prize ceremony is held every year at Harvard University, and genuine Nobel Laureates hand out the prizes to the winners, who are expected to give an acceptance speech of one minute or less.

This year's winners include:

• The authors of a paper called Sword Swallowing and it's Side-Effects, which won the Medicine prize for its conclusion that having a sore throat can be a problem if you want to swallow a sword.
• The biology prize was won by a Dutch scientist who carried out a survey of all the disgusting mites, insects, spiders and other life-forms we share our beds with. Ewwww!
• In aviation, the prize went to the scientists from Argentina who discovered that impotency drugs can help hamsters to recover from jet lag.
• And my absolute favorite, the peace prize was awarded to the US Air Force laboratory who attempted to develop the "gay bomb" - a chemical weapon that would provoke widespread homosexual behavior amongst enemy troops.

You can read about all this year's winners on the Ig Nobel Prize site at http://www.improb.com.

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