In keeping with humans’ seeming necessity to spoof everything, the Annals of Improbable Research have announced the 2007 Ig Nobel Prizes in preparation for next week’s real Nobel prize announcements.

Past recipients of Ig Nobel Prizes include a device designed emit a shriek only teenagers can hear to break up groups loiterers, a study into how woodpeckers avoid headaches, a birthing machine that uses centrifugal-force on pregnant women, and Britain’s official, six-page document detailing how to make the perfect cup of tea.

This is the first time I’ve heard of these awards, and I really like them. They’re better than the Darwin awards, because they’re for people actually going out and doing something productive, if seemingly silly. As a writer raised by two scientists, I’ve not only been taught to question things to find out how they work, I think outside of the realm of “normal” a lot of times, and it’s nice to see awards for creative thinking—even if they are tongue-in-cheek.

Here are this year’s winners (from the Guardian newspaper):

Medicine: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, for their report in the British Medical Journal, “Sword Swallowing and its Side-Effects” [Who knew sword swallowing could hurt your throat?]

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

Biology: Johanna van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, for a census of the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds

Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanilla essence from cow dung

Linguistics: Juant Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Barcelona University, for showing that rats cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards

Literature: Glenda Browne of Australia, for her study of the word “the” and the problems it causes when indexing

Peace: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, for instigating research on a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other

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

Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taiwan, for patenting a device that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them

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