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In the first week of October the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony was held at Harvard University's Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is the 18th year that the awards have been run to celebrate some of the more dubious and/or hilarious achievements of science.

The Annual Ig Nobel Prizes are run as a funny alternative to the annual Nobel prizes for medicine, chemistry, physics, economics, literature and peace.

The Ig Nobels honour real research and are based on published research papers. Usually the awarded reciprients go along with the light hearted awards.

One of the honoured award receivers, Deborah Anderson of Boston University Medical Centre and colleagues were awarded the chemistry prize for a 1985 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that found Coca-Cola kills sperm.

She said she was serious in testing the soft drink because women were using it in a douche as a contraceptive and, later, to try to protect themselves from the AIDS virus.

"It definitely wouldn't work as a contraceptive because sperm swims so fast," she said.
But Coke made with sugar does kills sperm, probably because sperm soak it up. "The sperm just kind of explode."

Another notable award reciprient was the team at Duke University in North Carolina who showed that high-priced placebos (expensive fakes) work better than cheap fake medicine.