It has long been used for fuel and fertiliser, so why not for food? Yet when Mayu Yamamoto identified a cheap way of turning manure into vanilla, she found that her work was ignored by multinational corporations.

Last night the Japanese scientist’s achievement finally received the recognition it deserved, in the form of an Ig Nobel prize for research that “cannot or should not be reproduced”. Ms Yamamoto, of the International Medical Centre of Japan, won the chemistry prize in the annual spoofs of the real Nobel awards. They are handed out annually at Harvard University for “science that makes you laugh, then makes you think”.

It honours her discovery that vanillin, the main ingredient of vanilla essence, can be synthesised from a wide variety of herbivore animal dung – from cows, goats, horses and even pandas. It cannot be made, however, from tiger excrement.

Marc Abrahams, who organises the prizes, said: “The vanillin is absolutely identical to the natural version, yet she has found it a little frustrating that she has not been able to find a food company that will use it. This tells us something interesting about the human concept of disgust. It’s a great example of what these awards are all about.” British science kept up its recent tradition of outstanding Ig Nobel performances with the medicine prize, won by Brian Witcombe, a consultant radiologist at Gloucestershire Royal NHS Trust, and his American collaborator Dan Meyer. Mr Meyer is president of the Sword Swallowers’ Association International, and the pair were honoured for revealing that the side-effects of the practice include sore throats – or “sword throat”, as they named the condition.

Of 46 sword-swallowers, who had between them swallowed more than 2,000 swords in the three months before they were surveyed, 19 reported suffering from sword throat. They were usually affected “when they were learning to swallow, after performing too frequently, or when they were swallowing multiple or odd-shaped swords”, the researchers wrote in the British Medical Journal.

The physics prize also had a British flavour. While its winners, Lakshmi-narayanan Mahadevan, and Enrique Cerda, now work elsewhere, much of their work in mapping how sheets become wrinkled was accomplished at the University of Cambridge.

A special aviation prize was created this year for Diego Golombek, Particia Agostino and Santiago Plano of Quilmes National University in Argentina, who showed this year how Viagra can fight jet lag in hamsters.

The US Air Force Wright Laboratory (now the Air Force Research Laboratory), was awarded the peace prize for its research into a chemical weapon nicknamed the “gay bomb”, designed to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to one another.

Unlike the majority of the award winners, the Air Force was not represented at the ceremony. Another absentee was Kuo Cheng Hsieh, from Taiwan, who won the economics prize for a device for catching bank robbers by dropping a net on their heads. He has been missing for several years. “The terrifying possibility has of course occurred to us that he is trapped somewhere in his own device and can’t get out,” Dr Abrahams said.

The nutrition prize was won by a team led by Brian Wansink, of Cornell University in New York state, for developing a bottomless bowl of soup with which to test theories about obesity. Dr Wansink discovered that when soup was constantly pumped into the bottom of a bowl so it refilled itself, people consumed an average of 73 per cent more food without stopping, yet did not feel any more full.

In linguistics, Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Se-astián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, showed that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards In literature, Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, studied the word “the” – and the many ways it causes problems when trying to put things into alphabetical order.

In biology, Professor Johanna van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, did a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds.

Prizes were handed out by six genuine Nobel laureates, and Dr Abrahams rounded off the ceremony with a salutation that has become traditional: “If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel prize tonight, and especially if you did, better luck next year.”

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