We Now Know The Secret Ingredient

They handed out the Ig Nobel Awards for this year today at Harvard. The "Igs", as they are called, honor some of the more creative research done in recent years. For example, one of this year's winners managed to extract vanilla flavoring from cow manure.

The Igs, as they are known, are chosen by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research to highlight scientific papers that, in the words of the magazine, "first make people laugh and then make them think."

Among the winners were a British-US duo who examined the side effects of sword swallowing and a Spanish team who finally answered the question of whether rats can discriminate between Japanese and Dutch spoken backwards.

"It was a surprise, it was the last thing we expected," said Nuria Sebastian-Galles, one of the Barcelona team of scientists, of the findings. The awards, she said, "bring out the freak inside most scientists."

Past winners have included the creator of the plastic pink flamingo, the inventor of an alarm clock that runs and hides and a researcher who reported the first known case of homosexual necrophiliac behavior in the mallard duck.

Research highlighted by this year's awards ranged from a study of how sheets wrinkle and how the word "the" causes headaches for indexes to why humans can't stop eating when presented with an apparently endless bowl of soup.

Also honored was a Taiwanese man who patented a device to net bank robbers.

The prestigious peace prize was given to a US Air Force laboratory for researching what the committee dubbed the "gay bomb" — a chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.

Japanese researcher Mayu Yamamoto, who received the chemistry Ig, got an additional honor: a local ice cream shop created a new flavor, the "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist," to honor her work extracting vanilla flavor from cow dung.

Why do you think they call it a cow pie?

Wait a minute. An alarm clock that runs and hides? Oh. My. God.