The Most Coveted Award in Science...the Ig Nobels

The 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer for their British Medical Journal article on the side effects of sword swallowing. The biology winner, Johanna van Bronswijk, received her awards for a series of papers tallying all the organisms that dwell in bedding. Other winners studied the extraction of vanillin from cow dung, if rats could differentiate between a person speaking Japanese from a person speaking Dutch, and created a device to stop bank robbers by releasing a net over them.

GTO is guessing that sword swallowing can get pretty messy — we don't even want to think about what lives in mattresses.