Dr. Sonal Saraiya and her colleagues in Michigan found that packing strips of cured pork in the nose of a child who suffers from uncontrollable, life-threatening nosebleeds can stop the hemorrhaging, a discovery that won them a 2014 Ig Nobel prize, the annual award for sometimes inane, yet often surprisingly practical, scientific discoveries.

This year's winners honored Thursday at Harvard University by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine included a team of researchers who wondered if owning a cat was bad for your mental health; Japanese scientists who tested whether banana peels are really as slippery as cartoons would have us believe; and Norwegian biologists who tested whether reindeer on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard were frightened by humans dressed to resemble polar bears.

As has become the custom, real Nobel laureates handed out the prizes and winners were given a maximum of 60 seconds to deliver their acceptance speech,

Sticking pork products up the patient's nose was a treatment of last resort when conventional treatments had failed, Saraiya said, and was only used for a very specific condition known as Glanzmann thrombasthenia, a rare condition in which blood does not properly clot.

"We had to do some out-of-the-box thinking," she said. "So that's where we put our heads together and thought to the olden days and what they used to do."

The 4-year-old child's nostrils were packed with cured pork twice, and according to their study, "the nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly (and) effectively."

The method worked because "there are some clotting factors in the pork ... and the high level of salt will pull in a lot of fluid from the nose," she said.

Still, Soraiya does not recommend sticking pork up your nose for a routine nosebleed, as it could cause infection.

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