Ig Nobel Prizes awarded

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 7 (UPI) -- The 2005 Ig Nobel Prizes, presented in Massachusetts, were a rich tapestry of human achievement from artificial dog's testicles to the Nigerian e-mail scam.

Marc Abrahams, editor of a science magazine, began awarding the prizes in 1991 for research "that cannot or should not be reproduced."

"Some of the projects were staggering," Abrahams told the BBC. "It made you laugh and then it made you think, and from the beginning that's what this has been about."

This year's awards were presented Thursday night at Harvard by four winners of the real Nobel Prizes.

Australia did especially well this year, with John Mainstone of the University of Queensland receiving the Physics Prize for an experiment involving sending tar through a funnel at the rate of one drop every nine years. Craig Williams of James Cook University was honored in biology for studying frog odors.

The Literature Prize went to the anonymous creators of Nigerian e-mail scams and the award for Medicine to Gregg Miller, the inventor of Neuticles, rubber testicles for neutered dogs.

The Peace Prize was awarded for a bit of inter-species interaction to British researchers who studied the brain waves of locusts watching "Star Wars" movies.