The Ig Nobel Awards are the jokey tongue-in-cheek equivalent to the Nobel Awards – (though the decision to award president Obama the Nobel Prize for Peace just a few months after he had taken up office looks an even bigger ‘joke’ now than it did then)
This years Ig Nobel prizewinners include the researchers who found leaning to the left while looking at an oblect makes that object appear smaller, and researchers who found brain activity in a dead salmon.
The one that caught my eye though – and which has great commercial potential – is the SpeechJammer, a machine that . . . disrupts a person’s speech by playing it back with a very slight delay.
“It’s a small thing you aim at someone who is droning on and on . . . What the person hears is just off enough that it completely disconcerts and discombobulates them, and they stop talking. It has thousands of potential good uses.“
Yes, I can think of a few uses for a device of that kind !!! 
Source - http://tinyurl.com/d3kfmp3
