rec.sport.football.college

/story/0,23599,22535789-13762, ?wp_ml=0

'Gay bomb' for enemy soldiers

By Jason Szep in Boston

October 05, 2007 02:51pm
Article from: Reuters

THE inventor of a method to extract vanilla fragrance from cow dung,
military developers of 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 humour magazine Annals of
Improbable Research, were presented overnight at a ceremony in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the winners must try to explain their
work in a minute or less.

While some awards clearly poke fun at popular culture, others are meant
to provoke debate about science, 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 (2006 Medicine), Dudley Herschbach
(Chemistry 1986), Robert Laughlin (Physics 1998), William Lipscomb (1976
Chemistry) and Sheldon Glashow (1979 Physics).

This year's winners include:

"Chemistry" - Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of
Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin, or vanilla fragrance
and flavoring, from cow dung.

"She seems to claim if companies start using this method it might help
with global warming because some of all the cow dung that causes
problems in the atmopshere will start getting used," Abrahams said.

"Linguistics" - Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria
Sebastian-Galles, of Universitat de Barcelona - for a study showing rats
sometimes fail to distinguish between a person speaking Japanese
backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

"Peace Prize" - The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio for
instigating research and development on a chemical weapon, the so-called
"gay bomb," that "will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible
to each other".

"Biology" - Dr. Johanna . van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of
Technology, The Netherlands, for their census of all the mites, insects,
spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi
that share our beds at night.

"Economics" - Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a
device in 2001 that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them,
known as the "net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately".

The inventor, however, could not be found by Ig Nobel representatives in
Taiwan.

"We had people in Taiwan looking for him. He's vanished. Somebody
suggested to us the possibility that maybe the poor man was trapped
inside his own machine," Abrahams said.