'Smart' toilet wins Nobel prize

And other stories from the stranger side of life

A dual toilet flush
(Image credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

"Reanimated spiders" and "smart toilets" have triumphed at the Ig Nobel prizes ceremony, said The Guardian. The prizes celebrate unusual areas of research that "make people laugh, then think", said the paper, and the Ig Nobel mechanical engineering prize went to the team that worked on reanimating dead spiders for use as mechanical gripping tools. The prize for public health was awarded to a smart toilet that monitor human waste for signs of disease uses an anal-print sensor to identify the user.

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  Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.