Pigeon-guided bombs, dead trout, and hair whorls win Ig Nobel prizes

One researcher has discovered that some people with the longest lives hail from places with poor recordkeeping; and the chemistry award was won by a research team who used a lab technique to separate drunk and sober worms

Ig Nobel prize winners: A researcher has found that the world's oldest man, Jiroemon Kimura, has "an extraordinary number of biographical anomalies and has three reported birthdays: one that seems to have been forged, one that was a typographic error inserted by demographers, and one that is supposedly real." Other prizes go to a project on teaching pigeons to guide missiles; and research into cows temporarily stopping ejecting milk when frightened

A Second World War project which involved training pigeons to pilot bombs has won this year's spoof Nobel peace prize.

The Ig Nobel gongs — awarded annually by the science humour magazine the Annals of Improbable Research — celebrate unusual areas of research that "make people laugh, then think".