IT IS a device with a variety of practical applications: an ingenious gadget that disperses gangs of loitering teenagers by emitting a piercing shriek only they can hear. Not the pinnacle of science, perhaps, but high enough to win the Welsh engineer who designed it an award from Harvard. Howard Stapleton has been awarded the 2006 Ig Nobel award for peace.
This year's winners were honoured — or dishonoured — at a raucous ceremony yesterday at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. They include a doctor who put his finger on a cure for hiccups; two men who think there is something to the adage that feet smell like cheese; and researchers who discovered that dung beetles won't tuck in to just any old pile of … well, dung.