The IgNobel prizes recognize research that “first make people laugh and then make them think”, in accordance with the award organizer, the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. This year the highlight in the ten categories was the winner of the Ig Nobel Peace Prize: research by the North American Air Force research laboratory to develop a gay bomb, a chemical weapon that would cause enemy soldiers to adopt homosexual behavior. In the linguistics category the winner was a team from the University of Barcelona for showing that rats could recognize the rhythmic differences between Dutch and Japanese sentences, but not if the words were replayed to them backwards. In the nutrition category the winner was Brian Wansink, from Cornell University; he assessed the appetite limits of volunteers when faced with a plate that was never empty. Among other winners were the use of impotence drugs for fighting jet-lag in rodents and the extraction of vanilla from cow dung.
RepublishPrize
2007 IgNobel winners
The prizes recognize research that “first make people laugh and then make them think”, in accordance with the award organizer
