The Hindu News Update Service

For the world's sword swallowers, it must have been an important study: a medical analysis of the dangers and side-effects of their profession. Fortunately, doctors concluded that the most likely injury from inserting a long piece of sharp steel down your food pipe was just a humble sore throat.

As well as adding to crucial knowledge about work-related injuries, the unique study Thursday night earned its author, radiologist Brian Witcombe in Gloucestershire, south-west England, this year's Ig Nobel prize for medicine.

A spoof of the Nobel prizes, which will be announced next week, the Ig Nobels celebrate the quirkier side of science. In previous years the prizes have honoured a centrifugal-force birthing machine that spins pregnant women at high speed and Britain's official six-page specification for how to make a cup of tea.

In his report, published in the British Medical Journal, Mr Witcombe wrote that sword swallowers knew theirs was a dangerous occupation. Because he could find only two reports in the literature of injuries from the practice, he canvassed almost 50 sword swallowers to explore their technique and its side-effects. "Sore throats - 'sword throats' - occur when swallowers are learning, when performances are repeated frequently, or when odd-shaped or multiple swords are used," he concluded.

He went on to describe how one swallower had lacerated his pharynx as he tried to swallow a curved sabre, another damaged his oesophagus and developed an inflammation of the protective membrane around his lungs "after being distracted by a misbehaving macaw on his shoulder", and a belly dancer suffered a major haemorrhage "when a bystander pushed dollar bills into her belt causing three blades in her oesophagus to scissor".

Ten winners received awards at last night's ceremony at Harvard University. The 2007 Ig Nobel for peace went to the Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. In 1994, researchers there submitted a three-page proposal to develop a chemical weapon that could make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other.

Documents detailing the idea were unearthed through a freedom of information request by the Sunshine Project, a lobby group that opposes biological weapons.

"We don't know if this document was the start and end of it or whether, in fact, this project continued and perhaps continues to this day," said Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and the man behind the Ig Nobel awards.

Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Australia won this year's Ig Nobel prize for literature with her study of the word "the" and the various problems it causes for anyone trying to index things. In a report for the journal the Indexer, she said that taking the "the" into account was useful in many situations: "In the book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, each 'the' is as important as the others. If we sort on the initial 'the' (as well as the following ones in their turn), then we are according each of the articles equal importance."

But she conceded that a blanket rule to incorporate "the" into indexes often led to long lists of titles starting with the word, making specific entries harder to find. A particular problem, Dr Abrahams added, was indexing the rock band the The.

Juan Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, of Barcelona University, collected the linguistics Ig Nobel for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

Genuine Nobel laureates presented the prizes to winners. Rich Roberts (medicine 1993), William Lipscomb (chemistry 1976), Craig Mello (medicine 2005), Robert Laughlin (physics 1998), Roy Glauber (physics 2005), Dudley Herschbach (chemistry 1986) and Sheldon Glashow (physics 1979) handed over the gongs.

Last year's winners included a Welsh engineer who designed a gadget to disperse gangs of loitering teenagers by playing a shriek that only they could hear and a study into how woodpeckers avoid headaches.

Dr Abrahams said of this year's winners: "They make you laugh when you first hear about them. You almost have no choice, then you can't quite get them out of your head afterwards. It's slightly difficult to accept that these things are real - but they are."

Sci. & Tech.