Lipscomb dressed as a bottle of beer at the ceremony. (Reuters)

Washington, Oct. 7 (Reuters): The inventors of artificial testicles for dogs and an alarm clock that runs away and hides, Nigerian Internet scammers and a team that calculated the pressures created when penguins pooh won Ig Nobel prizes yesterday.

The spoof prizes, awarded by the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research, are presented at a ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the winners must try to explain their work in a minute or less.

While some awards clearly poke fun at current culture, others are meant to provoke debate about science, Annals editor Marc Abrahams said.

“Now in their 15th year, the Igs honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think,” Abrahams said.

The Ig Nobel prizes were handed to the winners by genuine Nobel laureates Dudley Herschbach (1986 chemistry), William Lipscomb (1976 chemistry), Robert Wilson (1978 physics) and Sheldon Glashow (1979 physics).

This year’s winners include: Medicine ? Gregg Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing neuticles ? artificial replacement testicles for dogs.

“Neuticles allow your pet to retain his natural look, self esteem and aids in the trauma associated with neutering. With neuticles ? it’s like nothing ever changed!” reads his website, www.neuticles.com.

Economics ? Gauri Nanda of the MIT, for an alarm clock that runs away and hides.

Designed to overcome abuse of the snooze feature on most alarm clocks, Clocky falls to the floor and rolls away on the first push of the snooze button. To turn it off, a person must get out of bed and find it.

The clock designed by the 25-year-old student of Indian origin features two rubber wheels and is covered in thick, 1970s-style shag carpet and other material to cushion it when it tumbles to the floor.

Literature ? the Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, “for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters ? General Sani Abacha, Mariam Sanni Abacha and barrister Jon A. Mbeki Esq.”

The scams are notorious for asking people to reveal their private bank information to help fictitious characters transfer large sums of money.

Fluid Dynamics ? Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany, and the University of Oulu, Finland, and Jozsef Gal of Lorond Eotvos University in Hungary, for ‘Pressures Produced when Penguins Pooh ? Calculations on Avian Defecation’, an actual study published in 2003 in Polar Biology.