Scientific research into how polyester pants affect the sex life of rats, what it's like for a human to live like a badger and how different the world looks when viewed through your legs was honoured at this year's Ig Nobel spoof awards.  The awards also took a dig at Volkswagen AG, lauding it in chemistry for engineering its vehicles to produce fewer emissions "whenever the cars are being tested".  The prizes, which aim to honour accomplishments in science and humanities that make one laugh, then think, were to be awarded for a 26th straight year at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Friday (Australian time) by a group of real Nobel Prize winners.  "The prizes are for something pretty unusual," said Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, and host of the awards. "Almost any other kind of award is for the best or worst. Best or worst is irrelevant to us."  Timeliness is also of limited consideration: The Ig Nobel Reproduction Prize went to the late Ahmed Shafik of Egypt, who died in 2007, for a 1993 paper documenting that rats who wore polyester or polyester-cotton blend pants were less sexually active than those who wore cotton or wool pants or conformed to rat norms and wore no garments.  The paper suggested "electrostatic fields" created by polyester pants could play a role in impotence.  "We have never heard of anybody else who carefully spent time examining what happens sexually to rats if you put pants on them," Abrahams said.  Two Britons split this year's Biology Ig Nobel. Oxford University fellow Charles Foster, was honoured for his book Being a Beast, chronicling his experiments in living as a badger, including digging a den to sleep in and eating worms.  The work of compatriot Thomas Thwaites was in a similar vein. He built prosthetic leg extensions to try living like a goat in Switzerland.  Japan's Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi were granted the Perception Ig Nobel for a paper on how objects look different when one bends over and views them through one's legs.  Volkswagen's award was more ignominious, going to the company for equipping its vehicles with a "defeat device" that activated the emission controls of an engine undergoing government tests and deactivated them afterward.  VW has already agreed to spend up to $16.5 billion to address US environmental, state and owner claims.
Research into the effect of polyester pants on the sex lives of rats wins a prize in the funny and provocative Ig Nobel awards for science and humanities.