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FEEDBACK’S favourite prizes – the Ig Nobels – were handed out last week at Harvard University. Sponsored by the humourous magazine the Annals of Improbable Research, the prizes honour achievements that “cannot or should not be reproduced”. This year’s crop was a rich one.

A little device that can enhance interspecies understanding – at least between dogs and humans – earned Matsumi Suzuki of the Japan Acoustic Lab the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. Bowlingual translates a dog’s barks into Japanese. The devices were a big hit when they went on sale last month for 14,800 yen (about £77) in Japan, and some…

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