Scientists from the Universities of Adelaide and South Australia, working with a colleague from the Australian Wine Research Institute, have been honoured with an Ig-Nobel award for "painstakingly smelling and cataloging the peculiar odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed." The award for biology was presented in a ceremony at Harvard University in the United States last Thursday "to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology".

The citation for the Ig reads:

BIOLOGY: Benjamin Smith of the University of Adelaide, Australia and the University of Toronto, Canada and the Firmenich perfume company, Geneva, Switzerland, and ChemComm Enterprises, Archamps, France; Craig Williams of James Cook University and the University of South Australia; Michael Tyler of the University of Adelaide; Brian Williams of the University of Adelaide; and Yoji Hayasaka of the Australian Wine Research Institute; for painstakingly smelling and cataloging the peculiar odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed.

REFERENCE: "A Survey of Frog Odorous Secretions, Their Possible Functions and Phylogenetic Significance," Benjamin P.C. Smith, Craig R. Williams, Michael J. Tyler, and Brian D. Williams, Applied Herpetology, vol. 2, no. 1-2, February 1, 2004, pp. 47-82.

REFERENCE: "Chemical and Olfactory Characterization of Odorous Compounds and Their Precursors in the Parotoid Gland Secretion of the Green Tree Frog, Litoria caerulea," Benjamin P.C. Smith, Michael J. Tyler, Brian D. Williams, and Yoji Hayasaka, Journal of Chemical Ecology, vol. 29, no. 9, September 2003.

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Ben Smith and Craig Williams Details of the Ig Nobels can be found at the Ig Nobel website. Other Australians honoured were John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, who won the Physics Prize for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 -- in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.

Our personal favourite award remains the Peace Prize given last year to Daisuke Inoue -- the inventor of karaoke. This year's Peace Prize went to two academics from Newcastle University in the UK for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie "Star Wars."