'Gay Bomb' Wins Nobel ... Of Sorts

Oct 08, 11:51 PM

Current Headlines: By Rick Steelhammer

WHILE the world will have to wait until next week to learn who will win the 2007 Nobel Prizes for peace, medicine, physics and chemistry, the inventors of the "gay bomb" and a researcher who discovered that a number of health risks are associated with the practice of sword swallowing have been named winners in this year's Ig Nobel Prizes.

The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded annually at Harvard University to "celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative - and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology," by the producers of Annals of Improbable Research, a science humor magazine.

This year's Ig Nobel Peace Prize went to the U.S. Air Force's Wright Laboratories in Dayton, Ohio, for initiating research on a chemical weapon designed to "make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other." Work on the so-called "gay bomb," began in 1994 but apparently was never completed. The scheme was discovered during recent Freedom of Information Act filings by the Sunshine Project.

Doing her bit to reduce the effects of global warming by finding new reasons to recycle cow dung was Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, who developed a way to extract vanilla from common pasture patties.

While Yamamoto won the Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry, this year's Ig Nobel for medicine went to Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tenn., a professional sword swallower who co-authored "Sword Swallowing and its Side Effects" in the British Medical Journal.

Meyer's research uncovered the startling fact that an abnormally high number of throat and esophagus injuries are associated with his trade, often due to lapses in concentration. He cited the case of one swallower who damaged his esophagus "after being distracted by a misbehaving macaw on his shoulder."

The 2007 Ig Nobel Prize for linguistics went to a trio of Spanish researchers from Barcelona University, whose research proved that rats cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

This year's Ig Nobel for aviation went to three Argentine researchers who discovered that Viagra bolsters jetlag recovery in hamsters. Probably had a positive effect on the air-traveling hamster study group population as well.

In the economics division, the 2007 Ig Nobel went to Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taiwan for patenting a spring-loaded device that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

This year's physics award went to L. Mahadevan of Harvard and Enrique Villablanca of Santiago University in Chile for their study on how sheets become wrinkled.

While the 2007 winners represented an impressive body of work, an even more rounded field of researcher and inventors would have had their 15 seconds of fame had I been on the nominating committee.

Maybe next year the Ig Noble committee will consider the likes of:

Peace: The "Peeing Calvin" vehicle window decal. By using a likeness of the hyper-intelligent 6-year-old urinating on a person, motor vehicle logo, Jeff Gordon's car or "My Ex" to express disapproval, deep-felt anger is avoided and the stress of putting thoughts into words is avoided.

Nutrition: The inventor of Spam Lite, who made it possible for health-conscious carnivores like me to continue to enjoy salty mystery meat with half the fat and three-fourths the calories of the regular tinned food product.

Linguistics: The inventor of emoticons, for allowing us to share warm and fuzzy feelings with e-mail correspondents without having to create a series of meaningful words.

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