By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 7:01pm BST 04/10/2007
A British radiologist who discovered that sword swallowers suffer "major complications" when they are distracted or while gulping down more than one blade has been awarded an alternative Nobel prize.
Video: Watch the Ig Nobel awards ceremony
Brian Witcombe, a consultant radiologist at Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, has joined the pantheon of scientists whose research on "gay bombs", bottomless bowls of soup, giving jet lagged hamsters Viagra and stranger things besides have been deemed sufficiently quirky to win an "Ig Nobel".
advertisementMr Witcombe attended the ceremony at Harvard University's Sanders Theatre before an audience of around 1200, with thousands more watching on the web.
The prizes were handed out by real laureates during the annual event produced by the science humour magazine, "Annals of Improbable Research".
With Dan Meyer of The Sword Swallowers Association International, Mr Witcombe was cited for his penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects" that appeared in the British Medical Journal last Christmas.
They studied the fate of 46 sword swallowers. "Sore throats are common, particularly while the skill is being learnt or when performances are too frequent," they wisely observed.
"Sword swallowers without healthcare coverage expose themselves to financial as well as physical risk."
The physics prize went to Profs Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan of Harvard University and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
Complementing this pioneering work was a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds, which earned the biology prize for Prof Johanna van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands.
And for her efforts to extract vanilla fragrance from cow dung, the chemistry prize was scooped by Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan.
A ice cream shop located near the Ig Nobel ceremony, Toscanini's Ice Cream, created a new ice cream flavour in honour, called "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist."
The linguistics prize went to Juan Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés of the University of Barcelona for their remarkable discovery that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Australia, won the literature prize for her study of the word "the" - and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order; the peace prize went to The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, for instigating research on the so-called "gay bomb" to make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other; the nutrition prize was lapped up by Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self- refilling, bottomless bowl of soup; the economics prize went to Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them; and the aviation prize to Patricia Agostino, Santiago Plano and Diego Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
Must try this on Mrs SC guinea pig...
by 
