A huge crowd gathered at the Sanders Theater in Harvard University last night to honor the winners of the 19th Ig Nobel awards. For 2009, the Ig Nobel carried the theme “risk.”

And one of the winners is the ingenious bra that one can easily convert into a gas mask when needed. Elena Bodnar won this for public health prize division.

The Ig Nobel Prize is a celebration hosted by the Annals of Improbable Research and several Harvard student groups who seek to honor real science “that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think.”

Other winners of the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize include a research study that shows cows with names give more milk than their nameless peers, a process that creates diamonds from tequila and much more.

See the full list of the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize winners here.

Photograph by Steven Senne, AP