Hamster Jet Lag, Vanilla Cow Dung and a Self Refilling Bowl of Soup

The Ig Noble Prize awards people for scientific inventions that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

Some Winners for the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize

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.

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

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

Nutrition: Brian Wansink, for investigating people’s appetites by secretly feeding them a self-refilling bowl of soup.

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