Thank goodness for academic research:

Why do sheets wrinkle? Can a bomb turn straight soldiers gay? Will Viagra help hamsters get over jet lag?
Those are just a few of the timely and important questions explored by winners of Thursday’s 17th First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes. The awards are doled out each fall by the science-humor journal Annals of Improbable Research, whose editor, Marc A. Abrahams, often closes the ceremony with these words: “If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel prize tonight — and especially if you did — better luck next year.”
Following are this year’s prizes, by category:
Aviation: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano, and Diego A. Golombek, of the National University of Quilmes, in Argentina, for discovering that Viagra helps hamsters that suffer from jet lag.
Biology: Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns, and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.
Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto, of the International Medical Center of Japan, for coming up with a method of extracting vanilla from cow dung.
Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
Linguistics: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon, and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of the Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
Literature: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word “the” and of the problems it causes in alphabetization.
Medicine: Brian Witcombe, a radiologist at Britain’s Gloucester Royal Hospital, and Dan Meyer, executive director of the Sword Swallowers Association International, for their cutting-edge medical report, “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects.”
Nutrition: Brian C. Wansink, a professor of marketing at Cornell University, for his research into human appetite using self-refilling soup bowls.
Peace: The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, for prompting research into a bomb that would make enemy soldiers sexually attracted to each other and therefore, presumably, likelier to concentrate on love than war.
Physics: Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, a professor of applied mathematics at Harvard University, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca, of the University of Santiago de Chile, for their paper, “Wrinkling of an Elastic Sheet Under Tension.”