GEN-ERIC News

Good news for your Viagra-using hamster—on his next trip to Europe, he’ll bounce back from jet lag faster than his unmedicated friends. The researchers who revealed that bizarre fact earned one of ten Ig Nobel prizes awarded on Thursday for quirky, funny and sometimes legitimate scientific achievements, from the mathematics of wrinkled sheets to the US military’s efforts to make a ‘gay bomb’. The recipients of the annual award handed out by the annals of Improbable research magazine were honoured at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater. A team at Quilmes National University in Buenos Aires, Argentina, came up with the jet lag study which found that hamsters given the anti-impotence drug needed 50% less time to recover from a six-hour time zone change. Of course, they didn’t fly rodents to Paris. They just turned the lights off and on at different times. Odd as it may be, that research might have implications for millions of humans.