The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize Winners are given out by the Harvard-based humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Honoring the most bizarre theories and experiments. Even though the awards are tongue in cheek the research is for real, and someone paid for it

PEACE PRIZE: University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.

MEDICINE PRIZE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand — but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand — every day for more than sixty (60) years.

PHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don’t tip over.

MATHEMATICS PRIZE: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).

Some past Award winners

MEDICINE: Francis M. Fesmire of the University Of Tennessee College Of Medicine, for his medical case report” “Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage”. In our day we used to be told to drink a glass of water backwards. But research now suggests that, for intractable hiccups, a simple finger up the bottom can work wonders. As it can for so many things

MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects.”

PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.

CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring — from cow dung.

LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon — the so-called “gay bomb” — that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.

AVIATION: PatriciaV. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacionalde Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.

Since the beginning someone is always tiring to reinvent the wheel, or build a better widget. Check out these Darwinian repair jobs.

You can use the shower now

I am recycling, look at the lawn

Hot water works, and you can plug in your hairdryer

Express checkout

Finished the job in the bathroom

Honey! I fixed the barbque