'Gay Bomb,' Sword Eating Win Ig-Nobels

Making enemies 'sexually irresistible to each other' lights anti-Nobels' fuse

By Lucas Laursen, Newser Staff

Posted Oct 5, 2007 6:14 PM CDT

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'Gay Bomb,' Sword Eating Win Ig-Nobels — Craig Mello, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Medicine, left, and Roy Glauber (in hat), winner of the 2005 Nobel prize for Physics, watch as Dan Meyer, center, swallows a sword as Brian Witcombe, right, looks on during the Ig Nobel award ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Thursday Oct. 4,... (Associated Press)

The US military does some pretty cutting-edge research, but a hypothetical bomb that would make enemy troops make love to each other instead of war on the US? The proposal—along with detailed research on the effects of sword-swallowing, extracting vanilla from cowpies, and curing hamster jetlag with Viagra—yesterday won Ig Nobel Prizes for research that “that cannot, or should not, be reproduced.”

The cheeky awards, which real Nobel laureates at Harvard University have handed out since 1991, salute real—though not always down-to-earth—research. Unfortunately, the gay bomb researchers could not be tracked down. But Dan Meyer was "extremely surprised and honored" by the salute to his research, which concluded that one shouldn't swallow a sword with a sore throat. (More chemical warfare stories.)

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