Yeetle Box - Coke Explodes Sperm, and other great discoveries.

A researcher figured out that Coke explodes sperm. Scientists discovered people will happily eat stale chips if they crunch loudly enough.

What do they have in common? Each won "Ig Nobel" prizes Thursday.

Other winners: Physicists who found out that anything that can tangle, will tangle and a team of biologists who ascertained that dog fleas jump farther than cat fleas.

More about Coke...

Deborah Anderson of Boston University Medical Center 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. However, there was no cross-testing on Pepsi, RC Cola, or Dr. Pepper. Dr. Pepper might not be classified as a cola technically. This is still under review from the Scientists for Colas Board. A ruling is expected by 2012.

Ms. Anderson 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. Some women just liked the fizzy feeling.

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

Currently, Ms. Anderson is working on research that looks at the pattern of protein blasts of exploding sperm. Her research is cross-cultural.

It kills the AIDS virus too, she said.

And increases penis sizes by 25 percent among soft-shelled turtles.

Other findings of her research included that Coke Cola was established in 1886 and today owns 4 of the world's top 5 nonalcoholic sparkling beverage brands. Coke Cola Company employs 90,500 associates worldwide and operates in more than 200 countries.

Of note, Ms. Anderson's research reveals 1.5 billion Consumer Servings per day.

Said Ms. Anderson, "There is enough Coke in the world to cure nearly any known disease. One day the Coke Cola Company will be the world's largest pharmaceutical company. Period."

Other research of note....

The Ig Nobel committee made up a "nutrition prize" to go to Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Britain's Oxford University, who tricked people into thinking they were eating fresh potato chips by playing them loud, crunching sounds when they bit one. Using a concealed "boom box," researchers played the sounds of different animals chewing on various carcasses - to the delight of the unsuspecting test subjects. Lions gnawing on zebra bones seemed to be their favorite with a standard deviation of .004.

• The biology prize goes to a French team that found dog fleas can jump higher than cat fleas. NO actual research was done. This is still hypothetical, but the prize is in the hypothesis which blazes a trail in flea-jumping research - an area of study that has long since been inaccessible due to the lack of funding from the scientific community.
  
  
• The medicine prize was awarded to a team at Duke University in North Carolina who showed that high-priced placebos work better than cheap fake medicine. That is, patented placebos elicit a greater patient response than generic placebos.
  
  
• Dorian Raymer of the Scripps Institution in San Diego and a colleague won the physics prize for demonstrating mathematically why hair or a ball of string will inevitably tangle itself in knots. The mathematical formula was presented thus: K = BS (T) / PI.
  
  The peace prize was given to the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology for adopting the legal principle that plants have moral standing and dignity. Until this breakthrough, it was commonly held by the scientific community that plants failed to meet the criteria for sentience. Further work in establishing vegetative rights is underway for presentation to the Swiss chapter of People for the Ethical Rights of Plants (PERP).
  
  
  
  
• A team at The University of Sao Paulo in Brazil won a special archaeology prize for showing how an armadillo can mess up an archaeological dig. Their research consisted of dumping truckloads of armadillos into an archeological dig, then observing the interaction between the armadillos and the archeologists. In 100 percent of the cases, the interactions proved negative and destructive to the archeological dig.
  
  
  
  
• The economics prize went to researchers at the University of New Mexico who learned that a professional lap dancer earns bigger tips when she is most fertile. Something about phernomes...
  
  
• David Sims of Cass Business School in London won the literature prize "for his lovingly written study 'You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations'," the committee said.
  

Past winners include the creator of the plastic pink flamingo, a researcher who recorded a mallard duck sodomizing a dead drake and a doctor who cured hiccups by applying digital rectal massage.

The YeetleMaster