The Ig Nobel Prizes are a celebration of weird, pointless and entertaining scientific research that, as the Improbable Research organisation puts it, “first makes you laugh, then makes you think.”

Some of the winners from this year include:

– Nutrition: making crisps crunch louder than they should

– Biology: “fleas that live on a dog jump higher than fleas that live on a cat”

– Chemistry: conflicting teams arguing over whether coca-cola is an effective spermicide

– Physics: mathematical proof that heaps of string will inevitably tangle up in knots

All geniuses, no doubt.

Here is the acceptance speech of last year’s prizewinners for Medicine: Sword Swallowing!