Ceremony spotlights Ig Nobel feats

Cambridge, Mass.-- A way to extract fragrant vanillin from odorous cow dung won the Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry during the annual spoof at Harvard University in Massachusetts.

In fact, a local restaurant was so taken by Mayo Yamamoto's achievement that it imitated what she did and distributed samples of the resulting ice cream to the researchers, laureates and students who attended the "Seventeenth 1st Annual Ig Nobel Awards," the MIT Tech reported Friday.

The annual spoof recognizes 10 achievements it says "first make people laugh, and then make them think."

The prize in medicine went to Brian Witcombe from Britain and Dan Meyer from the United States for their study on the "Side Effects of Sword Swallowing." After their acceptance speech, Meyer demonstrated his sword-swallowing abilities.

It wasn't quite muskrat love, but the discovery that Viagra aids jet lag recovery in hamsters earned Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek from Argentina the prize in aviation.

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