Ig-Nobels - very amusing take on the Nobel Prizes

One of the reasons why my sister and I sign off our posts with "with a grain of salt" is to make sure that we do not descend into pretentiousness and self-righteousness. Keeps us from making a fool of ourselves and not to take us too seriously. People have a tendency of doing that, lol, because I firmly believe that there is nothing in the world that you cannot laugh at!

But here's an announcement about Ig Nobels, the alternative Nobel prize given to people whose research is basically so amazing that you just listena and go, eh? why the hell would you research anything like that? See this year's candidates:

Medicine Brian Witcombe of Gloucester and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee,
for their report in the British Medical Journal, Sword Swallowing and its
Side-Effects
Physics L Mahadevan of Harvard and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of
Santiago University, Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled
Biology Johanna van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, for a census of the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds
Chemistry Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanilla essence from cow dung
Linguistics Juant Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Barcelona University, for showing that rats cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards
Literature Glenda Browne of Australia, for her study of the word "the" and the problems it causes when indexing

Peace The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, for instigating research on a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other
Nutrition Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the
seemingly boundless appetites of human beings by feeding them with a
self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup
Economics Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taiwan, for patenting a device that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them
Aviation Patricia V Agostino, Santiago A Plano and Diego A Golombek of
Argentina, for the discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!