2007 Ig Nobel Awards Announced

prostoalex writes "The annual Ig Noble awards by Annals of Improbable Research were announced tonight. The winners included the scientists who discovered that impotence drugs help with jet lag recovery, "a Dutch researcher who conducted a census of all the creepy-crawlies that share our beds, Spanish scientists who found that rats sometimes could not distinguish between Japanese spoken backwards and Dutch spoken backwards, an Australian woman who documented the indexing problems caused by the word "the", a Japanese researcher who extracted vanilla flavoring from cow dung, and a Taiwanese man who patented a Batman-like device that drops a net over bank robbers," MSNBC says."

Comments

Re:Noble uses

[speaker of the truth]

Actually? Like really, actually? And the people in third world conditions don't tend to have kids just because they don't know about birth control - it's for helping around the house (especially for when they get older), and also they have lots because some are bound to die, etc. Actually. Right. But its one thing to have sex with someone because you enjoy it AND you could always use an extra pair of hands. Its quite another to have sex with someone that repulses you ONLY because you need an extra pair of hands. While the latter will still happen, it will happen less then the former.

How is my post flamebait anyway? On average homosexuals do have less sex with women the heterosexuals.

Re:Gay bomb - who tested this?

[Anonymous Coward]

The gay bomb was nothing more than a strong aphrodisiac "bomb". Doesn't make them gay, just temporarily horny.

Re:The indexing thing

[KDR_11k]

This is why most lists move a leading "the" or other particle to the end of the name. If you want that taken to the extreme try military indexing, they move all adjectives behind the noun (except in France because in France everything's backwards from the start).

Re:Viagra and jet lag

[ArAgost]

It is quite amusing if you think that what is now considered the main effect of Viagra was considered a side effect during the initial tests :)

Re:Viagra and jet lag

[MMC Monster]

I'm missing the idea as well. For a while high-dose melatonin was suggested to prevent jet lag (It worked for me, and also seems to improve my "performance" in bed as well). You never know what unusual side effects a medication has.

Viagra in particular is also the cheapest drug to treat pulmonary hypertension. Some other drugs to treat it literally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.