SOMEDAY SCIENCE WILL SAVE THE WORLD... BUT NOT YET

The 18th Annual Ig Noble Awards were handed out last week to honour some of the most bizarre scientific research of the year. The big winners for 2008 include the prize in Economics which went to the psychologists who discovered that strippers earn better tips while they are ovulating; the prize in Biology for researchers who discovered that fleas who live on dogs are better jumpers than fleas who live on cats; the prize for Literature went to a study of mean co-workers called "You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation Within Organizations"; the prize in Medicine went to the doctors who found that expensive fake medicine works better than cheap fake medicine; and the prize in Chemistry was shared by a team of American researchers who found that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide and a team from Taiwan which found that it is not. The complete list of winners is at Improbable.com where they claim that the awards were created to "celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative - and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology". Don’t forget creating fodder for this column... thanks guys!