Last updated at 10:22 15 October 2007

"All's fair in love and war," the old proverb goes.

And one group of military scientists certainly took the statement to heart when they designed a "gay bomb" to make enemy soldiers irresistible to each other.

Researchers from the US Air Force submitted a three-page proposal to Pentagon chiefs to develop lust-creating chemical weapon, it has been revealed.

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Scientists at the Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio - working to make American military might even mightier - made the discovery in 1994, according to detailed papers unearthed through a freedom of information request.

And last night they were finally rewared with an Ig Nobel prize for peace, a spoof of the Nobel prizes, due to be announced next week.

Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and the man behind the Ig Nobel awards, explained: "We don't know if this document was the start and end of it or whether, in fact, this project continued and perhaps continues to this day."

The awards ceremony at America's prestigious Harvard University celebrate the quirkier side of science, handing out 10 gongs.

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In previous years the prizes have honoured a centrifugal-force birthing machine that spins pregnant women at high speed and Britain's official six-page specification for how to make a cup of tea.

Among this year's winners was Briton Brian Witcombe, who picked up a gong for discovering that sword swallowing's most common injury is, surprise, surprise, a sore throat.

In his report, published in the British Medical Journal, Mr Witcombe, a radiologist at Gloucestershire Royal NHS foundation trust, wrote that sword swallowers knew theirs was a dangerous occupation.

Because he could find only two reports in the literature of injuries from the practice, he canvassed almost 50 sword swallowers to explore their technique and its side-effects.

"Sore throats - 'sword throats' - occur when swallowers are learning, when performances are repeated frequently, or when odd-shaped or multiple swords are used," he concluded.

He went on to describe how one swallower had lacerated his pharynx as he tried to swallow a curved sabre.

And another damaged his oesophagus and developed an inflammation of the protective membrane around his lungs "after being distracted by a misbehaving macaw on his shoulder".

Also, a belly dancer suffered a major haemorrhage "when a bystander pushed dollar bills into her belt causing three blades in her oesophagus to scissor".

Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Australia won this year's Ig Nobel prize for literature with her study of the word "the" and the various problems it causes for anyone trying to index things.

In a report for the journal the Indexer, she said that taking the "the" into account was useful in many situations: "In the book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, each 'the' is as important as the others.

"If we sort on the initial 'the' (as well as the following ones in their turn), then we are according each of the articles equal importance."

But she conceded that a blanket rule to incorporate 'the' into indexes often led to long lists of titles starting with the word, making specific entries harder to find. A particular problem, Dr Abrahams added, was indexing the rock band the The.

Juan Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Barcelona University, collected the linguistics Ig Nobel for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

Genuine Nobel laureates presented the prizes to winners. Rich Roberts (medicine 1993), William Lipscomb (chemistry 1976), Craig Mello (medicine 2005), Robert Laughlin (physics 1998), Roy Glauber (physics 2005), Dudley Herschbach (chemistry 1986) and Sheldon Glashow (physics 1979) handed over the gongs.

Last year's winners included a Welsh engineer who designed a gadget to disperse gangs of loitering teenagers by playing a shriek that only they could hear and a study into how woodpeckers avoid headaches.

Dr Abrahams said of this year's winners: "They make you laugh when you first hear about them. You almost have no choice, then you can't quite get them out of your head afterwards. It's slightly difficult to accept that these things are real - but they are."

The Winners...

Medicine: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, for their report in the British Medical Journal, Sword Swallowing and its Side-Effects.

Physics: L Mahadevan of Harvard and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Santiago University, Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.

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

Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanilla essence from cow dung.

Linguistics: Juant Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Barcelona University, for showing that rats cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

Literature: Glenda Browne of Australia, for her study of the word "the" and the problems it causes when indexing.

Peace: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, for instigating research on a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other.

Nutrition: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.

Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taiwan, for patenting a device that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

Aviation: Patricia V Agostino, Santiago A Plano and Diego A Golombek of Argentina, for the discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsterse.