To balance PhilHarries' thread in the Serious sub-forum:

The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes, annually awarded for the ten achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.

Chemistry & Nutrition are my favorites - but it's all good.

2007 winners

Aviation: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek, for discovering that hamsters recover from jetlag more quickly when given Viagra.

Biology: Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk, for taking a census of all the mites and other life forms that live in people's beds.

Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto for extracting vanilla flavour from cow dung.

Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, for patenting a device to catch bank robbers by ensnaring them in a net.

Linguistics: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, for determining that rats sometimes can't distinguish between recordings of Japanese and Dutch played backward.

Literature: Glenda Browne, for her study into indexing words that start with the word "the".

Medicine: Dan Meyer and Brian Witcombe, for investigating the side-effects of swallowing swords.

Nutrition: Brian Wansink, for investigating people's appetite for mindless eating by secretly feeding them a self-refilling bowl of soup.

Peace: The Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, for suggesting the research and development of a "gay bomb," which would cause enemy troops to become sexually attracted to each other.

Physics: L. Mahadevan and Enrique Cerda Villablanca for their theoretical study of how sheets become wrinkled.

The 2008 awards are due soon - link to earlier winners.

I would like to see research into how good a meal tastes in relation to how much you are looking forward to eating it. I am sure there is an inverse relationship in many cases. Any other ideas or offers of funding?

To balance PhilHarries' thread in the Serious sub-forum:

The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes, annually awarded for the ten achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.

Peace: The Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, for suggesting the research and development of a "gay bomb," which would cause enemy troops to become sexually attracted to each other.

Reminds me - 'back in the day' - in the Israeli Army (IDF) there was a saying that "We have nothing to fear from an army that holds hands". Which, if you've worked in the Middle East, applies to almost all of the Arab forces. They are recruited from the small villages or are Bedou and have never before ventured away from their comfort zone. Thus you see them walking the streets in two's and three's and clinging to each others' hands for dear life.

Well, these types are balancing out the gene pool.

Darwinism.

:cheesy::cheesy: