A British radiologist has won an alternative Nobel prize for discovering that sword swallowers suffer "major complications" when distracted.
Brian Witcombe, a consultant radiologist at Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, was awarded an Ig Nobel prize.
He joins scientists whose work in fields such as gay bombs, bottomless bowls of soup and giving jet lagged hamsters Viagra has been deemed sufficiently quirky to win an Ig Nobel.
Mr 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 medical report Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects, in the British Medical Journal.
"Sore throats are common, particularly while the skill is being learnt or when performances are too frequent," they observed after studying 46 sword swallowers.
Meanwhile, the peace prize was awarded to the US Air Force Wright Laboratory for researching a chemical weapon that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among enemy troops.
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.
Prof Johanna van Bronswijk, of Eindhoven University of Technology, won the biology award for a census of the mites, insects, spiders, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds.
And for her efforts to extract vanilla fragrance from cow dung, the chemistry prize went to Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan.
The linguistics prize went to a team from the University of Barcelona for their discovery that rats cannot tell the difference between Japanese being spoken backwards and Dutch being spoken backwards.
Ref:
Ananova.
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