Ig Nobel laureates are honored at Harvard

An ocean away from Stockholm where the real Nobel Prizes were announced this week, paper airplanes bombarded the stage of Harvard's Sanders Theater Thursday night, as 10 of the world's most hilarious achievements were honored -- and heckled -- at the 15th First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes.

Under the strict watch of ''Miss Sweetie Poo," an 8-year-old who shooed scientists off stage when their speeches got too boring, scientists in Speedos received the award for settling the age-old scientific question: Would humans swim faster or slower in syrup?

A European team that unraveled the mysteries of avian defecation in its report, ''Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh," clinched the fluid dynamics prize. And a Japanese doctor who photographed every meal he has eaten for the last 34 years to find the perfect brain-boosting diet got his just desserts with the nutrition award.

''The ceremony fits almost any category you think of: It's an awards ceremony, it's a circus, it's an opera," said Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, who said he and a ''shadowy group" called the Ig Nobel Board of Governors select the winners each year for research ''that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think."

Seven of the winners traveled to Cambridge at their own expense to receive the awards -- infinity signs mounted on a prism -- from actual Nobel laureates, while others, including the penguin researchers, sent in video acceptances. They were unable to attend because of visa problems: ''Let's hope it had nothing to do with the explosive nature of our work," they said in the video.

''Talk about one crazy, wacky day," said Gregg Miller, a self-proclaimed ''neurotic pet owner" from Missouri who won this year's Ig Nobel for medicine for his invention of artificial dog testicles -- called ''Neuticles." The idea for the implant struck after he reluctantly neutered his bloodhound, Buck.

Dr. Yoshiro NakaMats, 77, who has photographically monitored his diet for decades to find the key to longevity and positive brain activity, said he enjoyed a delicious, late-night bowl of clam chowder the evening he won his award, but won't know the effects of the food on his brain activity until tomorrow.

Other awards included the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to English scientists for their work monitoring the activity of the brain cells of locusts as they watched highlights from the movie ''Star Wars." Gauri Nanda, a former graduate student at MIT, took home the economics prize for ''Clocky," a shag-covered alarm clock that wheels across the room, forcing would-be oversleepers out of bed to hunt for the snooze button. Australian and Canadian scientists who won the biology award smelled and catalogued the odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when they felt stressed.

This year's ceremony, with an A-list of real Nobel laureates handing out prizes -- including a mannequin with a photo of Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek's face pasted on top because he couldn't attend -- was special in another way: Roy J. Glauber, the Harvard University professor who has been on stage during the ceremony, sweeping away the paper airplanes for the past 10 years, was awarded his own real Nobel in physics -- days before the ceremony.

''Just existing, the Ig Nobels make the Nobels shine all the more brightly," Abrahams said yesterday.

This year's winners will present five-minute lectures on their discoveries today at 1 p.m. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in room 10-250.