The Pope, himself, has been quoted in the past as saying that he would let the idea of limbo "drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis".

He was quoted as saying that limbo has never been a "definitive truth of the faith".

Vatican to review limbo

According to the BBC's Religion and Ethics site [see internet links, right], the church held that before the 13th Century, all unbaptised people, including new born babies who died, would go to hell. This was because original sin - the punishment that God inflicted on humanity because of Adam and Eve's disobedience - had not been cleansed by baptism.

This idea however was criticised by Peter Abelard, a French scholastic philosophiser, who said that babies who had no personal sin didn't even deserve punishment.

It was Abelard who introduced the idea of limbo. The word comes from the Latin "limbus", meaning the edge. This would be a state of existence where unbaptised babies, and those unfortunate enough to have been born before Jesus, would not experience pain but neither would they experience the Beatific Vision of God.

But limbo has long been a problem for the Church. Unease has remained over reconciling a Loving God with one who sent babies to limbo and the Church has faced much criticism.

The current review of limbo began in 2004, when Pope John Paul II asked the commission to come up with "a more coherent and enlightened way" of describing the fate of such innocent babes.

This review is part of a wider re-examination of the notion of salvation that has been taking place within the Church.

Many Catholics would see the abandonment of limbo as a good thing - there is little doubt that some interpretations of the teaching may have caused untold misery to the millions of parents whose children have died without being baptised.

But there are those who argue that it is not simply a "hypothesis" that can just be swept aside; that the notion that unbaptised children do not go to heaven has been a fundamental part of Church teaching for hundreds of years.

Then, of course, there is the argument that if this can be abolished, what else is disposable?

Not popular

According to church historian Michael Walsh limbo is so unpopular it has all but dropped out of Catholic consciousness.

It has not really been standard teaching for decades and it has not been part of official teaching since the early 1990s, when it was omitted from the catechism - the Church's summary of religious doctrine.


A papal decree reversing the firm Catholic belief of two millennia that infants dying unbaptised to not go to heaven would be like an earthquake in the structure of Catholic theology and belief
Father Brian Harrison
"Most priests don't talk about the notion of limbo anymore. There is a understanding that it just simply doesn't wash with people," says Mr Walsh.

But, there are a number of conservative and traditionally minded Catholics who say they are shocked by the notion of getting rid of limbo.

Father Brian Harrison, a theologian, told the BBC News website that while limbo may have been a "hypothesis", he argues that the clear "doctrine of the Catholic Church for two millennia has been that wherever the souls of such infants do go, they definitely don't go to heaven".

He argues that this is borne out in the various funeral rites for unbaptised children practised by the Church.

"A papal decree reversing the firm Catholic belief of two millennia that infants dying unbaptised do not go to heaven would be like an earthquake in the structure of Catholic theology and belief," he said.

Some argue that the question of limbo has taken on fresh urgency because it could be hindering the Church's conversion of Africa and Asia, where infant mortality rates are high.

An article in the UK's Times newspaper this week suggested that the "Pope - an acknowledged authority on all things Islamic - is only too aware that Muslims believe the souls of stillborn babies go straight to heaven".

The theological commission ends its deliberations on Friday. Most commentators believe the Pope will not make any decision immediately. Until he does, the fate of limbo is in - well, limbo.

For Mr Stapleton, of Compound Security Systems in Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales, the accolade came for his electronic teenager repellant, called the Mosquito.

The Mosquito exploits an ageing effect that sees our ability to hear high frequency sounds dwindle as we get older. In our teens, we can typically hear sounds ranging from 20Hz to 20kHZ, but with age, the highest frequencies we can hear drops, sometimes to 18kHz or less.

"We discovered that, even at relatively low volumes, the right frequency noise would only be heard by 25s and below and it was highly annoying after five minutes," Mr Stapleton said. "The Mosquito was born."

Tests of the £580 unit at a local Spar shop in Barry, south Wales, last year were declared a success when teenagers that congregated outside the premises pleaded with the owner, Robert Gough, to turn it off. Older customers were reported to be oblivious to the high-pitched shriek. The box, mounted on a wall outside the shop, was programmed to emit an 80-decibel pulse of high frequency sound that cleared an area up to 15 metres away.

A second Ig Nobel went to US scientists for their work on the mystery of why fingernails being dragged down a blackboard produces an excruciating sound. The team, which was led by D. Lynn Halpern at Northwestern University in Chicago, found the noise topped a list of annoying sounds and revealed that it remains deeply unpleasant even if the high-pitched squeals are digitally silenced.

The study, entitled Psychoacoustics of Chilling Sound, was published in the journal Perception and Psychophysics but failed to answer the pressing question of why the sound is so shudder-inducing: "Still unanswered, however, is the question of why this and related sounds are so grating to the ear," the authors wrote.

In all, 10 winners were honoured with awards, including Ivan Schwab of the University of California, Davis, who received the ornithology prize for his paper on how woodpeckers avoid headaches.

His research, published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, followed studies of head injuries in woodpeckers from the 1970s. The answer lies in how a woodpecker's skull and brain are arranged: the muscles around the sensitive brain tissues make the woodpecker's head function like a perfect shock absorber.

Dr Abrahams said it was classic Ig Nobel territory. "It epitomises what the Ig Nobels do every now and again - the moment they hear the question, they're happy that somebody has put the question into words and they're even happier that someone's begun to answer it," he said. "This prize will give new meaning to the old phrase, to rack your brains."

While this year's Nobel prize for physics went to two scientists who helped to prove that the universe began with a big bang, Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris won the Ig Nobel physics prize for tackling the conundrum of why dry spaghetti breaks into more than one piece when it is bent.

The prizes were handed to the winners by Nobel laureates Roy Glauber (Physics, 2005), Dudley Herschbach (Chemistry, 1986), William Lipscomb (Chemistry, 1976), Rich Roberts (Physiology or Medicine, 1993) and Frank Wilczek (Physics, 2004).

Each winner was allowed 60 seconds to deliver an acceptance speech and will try to explain themselves further at public lectures tomorrow afternoon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Last year, top billing went to the award for fluid dynamics, shared by Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of the International University Bremen and Jozsef Gal of Lorand Eotvos University in Hungary "for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin". Previous years have honoured a centrifugal-force birthing machine that spins pregnant women at high speed and Britain's official six-page specification for how to make a cup of tea.

Dr Abrahams said the awards, now in their 16th year, are becoming increasingly popular, with up to 7,000 new nominations every year. "Some of those nominees are really intent on getting an Ig Nobel prize for themselves," he said. "Not only are individuals nominating themselves, we see companies nominating their employees, universities nominating their faculty and, in a couple of cases, governments nominating ... people."

Last night's ceremony ended with the traditional call from Dr Abrahams to researchers everywhere: "If you didn't win an Ig Nobel prize tonight - and especially if you did - better luck next year."