MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan
Meyer of Antioch,
Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword
Swallowing and Its Side Effects."
PHYSICS: L.
Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique
Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
BIOLOGY: Prof.
Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University
of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects,
spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi
with whom we share our beds each night.
CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan,
for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring
-- from cow dung.
LINGUISTICS: Juan
Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés,
of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell
the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person
speaking Dutch backwards.
LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for
her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes
problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.
PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating
research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay
bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become 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 Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device,
in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
AVIATION: Patricia
V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional
de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery
in hamsters.