Hamsters on Viagra nab prize

Good news for your Viagra-using hamster: On his next trip to Europe he’ll bounce back from jet lag faster than his unmedicated friends.

The researchers who revealed that bizarre fact earned one of 10 Ig Nobel prizes awarded Thursday night for quirky, funny and sometimes legitimate scientific achievements, including the mathematics of wrinkled sheets and U.S. military efforts to make a “gay bomb.”

The recipients of the annual award handed out by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine were honored at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater.

A team at Quilmes National University in Buenos Aires came up with the jet-lag study, which found that hamsters given the anti-impotence drug needed 50% less time to recover from a six-hour time zone change. They didn’t fly rodents to Paris -- they just turned the lights off and on at different times.

The U.S. Air Force won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize this year for its proposal to develop a “gay bomb,” a chemical weapon that would make enemy forces want to make love with each other, not war with their opponents.

Abrahams talked to a number of retired and active Air Force personnel to try and get someone to accept the prize in person on behalf of the military. None would.