andygates

It's that time of year again: the Ig Nobel awards for science bordering on the jaw-droppingly pointless.  Okay, the magic soup bowl (award for nutrition: a study into dietary habits with a self-filling bowl) may provide actual insight into people's behaviour when confronted with a mega-bucket of popcorn, but the gay bomb, retrolinguistic capacities of ducks ("Damn fine cup of pond-weed") and medical consequences of sword swallowing are surely worthy winners of this, science's closest thing to the Turner Prize.

The stars of the show have to be the hamsters on Viagra.  Yes, they were testing jetlag recovery and blood-flow and they're reasonable models for the mammal system, but the fact that this is borderline legitimate sensible stuff does nothing to un-Ig it.  "Hamsters on Viagra."  Say it out loud.  If it doesn't bring a smile, you may be clinically dead.