The IgNobel prizes

[LaFille]

...Are given each year to the researchers who conducted the most improbable/absurd/weird studies, as a kind of counterpart to the famous Nobel awards; they "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think". I'm probably posting that a bit late, but maybe had someone not heard about it yet...

Here are my favorite winners for this year ;D :

MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."

CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.

LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.

AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.

More about the IgNobel awards, the previous winners and improbable research can be found here: improbable.com/ig/ .

[Elliot Kane]

ROFL! Good find, Fille! ;D

[Alrik]

Wikipedia also has a page on it.

One proze was given to an Australien who had patended the WHEEL - and to the Australien patent registry which GRANTED him that.

[Galadriel]

OMG!! They are so useless that I find it a waste of time to read the website ;D
But the ones you choose Fille, are among the best ones anyway

[LaFille]

If it was worth a laugh, a reaction and discussion, then it was at least certainly not all useless. ;D
But seriously, sometimes when we see what the motivation/justification was to make such researches or what can be learnt from it it gives them a different look. And some other times it brings up concepts such as "ethics", "waste" or "priorities"... ;D