Health

Discovery of Coca-Cola as Spermicide Wins Mock Nobel Prize

Friday, October 03, 2008 | FoxNews.com

Groups of researchers who discovered that Coca-Cola makes sperm "explode," and that people are more than happy to eat stale potato chips if they crunch loudly enough are two of the winners of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes -- a mocking take on the Nobel Prizes, which will be awarded next week.

In a 1985 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Deborah Anderson of Boston University Medical Center and colleagues found that Coca-Cola kills sperm by making it explode, Reuters reported. They received an Ig Nobel in chemistry for that discovery.

Other winners of the prizes, awarded by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research, included physicists who "discovered" that anything that can tangle will tangle, as well as some biologists who found that dog fleas jump farther than cat fleas.

The Ig Nobels -- Ig is a play on the word "ignoble" -- honor real research and are intended to be humorous. The "honored" researchers often go along with the joke, according to the report.

The Ig Nobel Prize is awarded at Harvard University annually for "achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced."

Click here to read more on this story from Reuters.