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Add 1 to the practical uses of RC Heli: Collecting Whale Snot.
See Link above.
This year's IgNobel Prize winners, as always, came up with ingenious ways to do really zany things. This year's winner in the physics category, for example, discovered that people who wear socks on the outsides of their shoes are less likely to fall while walking on ice. Another researcher earned the vaunted prize for his straight-to-DVD research on fruit bat fellatio.
Perhaps the weirdest feat, though, was pulled off by Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin, of the U.K.'s Zoological Society. As the Daily Mail reports, the zoological researchers took home the IgNobel for using a remote-controlled helicopter to gather (presumably enormous) whale boogers. "The technique involves flying a remote-controlled helicopter above a whale as it surfaces, and catching the whale blow in petri dishes attached to the underside of the helicopter," reads a statement from the winners, who say their work could offer a new way to study respiratory diseases in whales.
Bizarre as these achievements are, they're all rooted in some sort of hard science, and may actually help advance future research. The IgNobels, after all, are intended to "first make people laugh, and then make them think" -- the only exception, of course, being BP, which won an IgNobel "for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix." That made us laugh, and then made us mad all over again.