The Ig Nobel Awards are presented at Harvard University by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine for the world’s weirdest, wackiest and often most worthless scientific research.

Conceived as a parody of the revered Nobel Prizes and a distant cousin of the much-loved Darwin Awards, the Ig Nobels were first awarded in 1991 for discoveries "that cannot, or should not, be reproduced." Ten prizes are awarded each year across categories physics, literature and peace as well as public health, engineering and interdisciplinary research.

And the winner is…

The 2007 IG Nobel for chemistry was awarded to Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan who developed a method to extract vanilla fragrance and flavoring from cow dung.

Joining Mayu in the winner’s circle was The Air Force Wright Laboratory of Dayton, Ohio who claimed the Ig Nobel for Peace. The lab instigated research and development on a chemical weapon, the so-called "gay bomb”, a device aimed at averting combat-related deaths by making enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to one another.

Honourable mentions also go to Dr Johanna van Bronswijk for her thorough research into the habits of bed bugs, a team at Argentina’s University of Quilmes for discovering that viagra can help hamsters recover from jet lag and to Britain’s Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer who investigated the health problems that can result from sword swallowing.

Sadly, there was one Ig Nobel winner who couldn’t attend the Harvard ceremony. Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taichung, Taiwan was awarded the prize for Economics for patenting a device designed to immediately capturing bank robbers by trapping them in a falling net. Unfortunately, Kuo Cheng has vanished and could not be located in his homeland to be told of his success. One theory put forward is that he’d become trapped in his own net.