The Funniest Science on Earth

Why plow through years of graduate school, labor nights and weekends, abandon your family in the name of science? Because one day, if you're very lucky, your work may be recognized by some prestigious international award committee. If you're only kind of lucky, though, you still might be able to snag an Ig Nobel.

This year's esteemed spoof awards went to a range of research, papers and patents that met the tight criteria: "First make people laugh, and then make them think." Among the winners was the Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, which swept the Peace category for its research into a harmless, but doubtless hilarious, "gay bomb." The weapon, laden with aphrodisiac chemicals, would presumably make enemy soldiers so irresistible to one another that they would drop their weapons in favor of dropping trou. Oddly, no one attended to accept the prize.

Other winners ran the gamut from food science (who knew you could extract vanilla from cow dung?) to medicine (who knew sword swallowing could cause a sore throat?). For the full list of science winners, launch the gallery. But to get you in the right frame of mind, you may first want to check out the highly informative keynote speech below.—Abby Seiff and John Mahoney

Launch the gallery for a list of this year's winners

Comments

[Maxine Feadler]

"Gay Bomb"- Is that what happened to my husband? After 20 months in Iraq he returned transgendered. Needless to say, it ended our 24 year marriage.

[lakewood florist]

vanilla from a cow dung?!

[Online Pharmacy no Prescription]

The online pharmacy no prescription phrase works on two distinct planes; the internet and non prescription medication. But, we are fusing the phrase so that it means something and we can use the constituent parts of the phrase to create an idea. The concept of “online pharmacy no prescription” is designed for the purpose of providing medication over the internet (online) for all those people all over the world who are in dire need of suitable medication at reasonable prices, which is exactly the reason behind generic meds.