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Ig Nobel awards give peace (and animal dung) a chance

Awards for unusual yet practical science experiments celebrated low-brow humor, garnered one winner an ice cream recognition.

Candace Lombardi
In a software-driven world, it's easy to forget about the nuts and bolts. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgetry or industrial machines, Candace Lombardi examines the moving parts that keep our world rotating. A journalist who divides her time between the United States and the United Kingdom, Lombardi has written about technology for the sites of The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, MSN, ZDNet, Silicon.com, and GameSpot. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET.
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Candace Lombardi
2 min read

There's nothing like nerd humor to keep the world's problems in perspective.

Harvard University once again played host to the Ig Nobel awards given out by the "Annals of Improbable Research," a parody of the Nobel prizes awarding people for scientific inventions that "first make people laugh, and then make them think."

This year's Ig Nobel peace prize brought new meaning to the phrase "make love, not war."

It went to the Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. The group invented a chemical weapon, nicknamed the "gay bomb," that when dropped causes heterosexual men to become attracted to one another instead of aggressive.

Meanwhile, the Ig Nobel prize for medicine went to Dan Meyer and Brian Witcombe for studying the side effects of sword swallowing.

There also seemed to be an animal metaphor theme running through the winning entries.

Prizes included an aviation Ig Nobel to Patricia Agostino, who discovered that hamsters who take Viagra recover faster from jet lag, and an Ig Nobel in biology to Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk for determining the population of dust mites and other insects in beds.

Part of the ceremonial events also included a speech in which the word "chicken" was repeated in different ways for two minutes.

One winner was treated to a double honor.

Toscanini's Ice Cream named a flavor after Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan called "Yum-A-Moto Vanilla Twist." Yamamoto won the Ig Nobel prize in chemistry for "developing a way to extract vanillin--vanilla fragrance and flavoring--from cow dung."

Last year the Ig Nobel Peace Prize went to Howard Stapleton for his "electromechanical teenager repellant," a high-pitch ringtone (MP3) that's usually only audible to people under 30.