The winners of the seventeenth annual awards, organised by Improbable Research, include:

• Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre, Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin (a vanilla flavouring) from cow dung

• Medicine: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, for their report in the British Medical Journal about the occupational hazards of sword-swallowing

• Peace: the Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, for instigating research on a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other (the “gay bomb”)

• Aviation: Patricia V Agostino, Santiago A Plano and Diego A Golombek of Argentina, for the discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters

• Nutrition: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup

All that leaves me feeling surprisingly peckish. For further details of a special commorative ice-cream, designed especially for the occasion (yes, you guessed – vanilla, but with a twist!), plus a series of FREE lectures tomorrow (Saturday 6th October), head straight for the horse’s mouth. Neither treat will be accessible to you if you are outside Massachusetts, unfortunately.

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