The IgNobles

Ignoble means completely lacking nobility in character or quality or purpose.

The IgNoble awards are a parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October — around the time the recipients of the genuine Nobel Prizes are announced — for ten achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think."

These are the winners for 2007:-

• 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 Japanese, played backward, and Dutch, played backward.
• Literature: Glenda Browne, for her study of 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.