'We are a little confused tough, as to how you would spot a jetlagged hamster. From our own childhoods we seem to remember the damn things spent virtually 24 hours a day sleeping, or hiding in a plastic boot.'

Don't they spend practically all their lives being dead?

‘Spammers target hamsters after Ig Nobel winning research’.

What has this article got to do with spammers, and why are hamsters reading my e-mail ?

I'm assuming it's a vague reference to giving small rodents Viagra, although I wait with baited breath for the first spam that I receive that mentions this award or is targeted specifically towards hamsters.

Perhaps El Spammo reckons hamsters are the way to go after seeing the Egg credit card adverts.

According to the Beeb earlier:

"Linguistics - A University of Barcelona team for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards"

Nary a Duck or a german were reported. Off course the BBC could be wrong and the cannonical site is not responding now.

No, it probably has to do with the fact that spammers push Viagra.

@Anony Vult

It's "bated" breath, not "baited", unless you've been filling your mouth with hamster food in the hope of catching one...

Richard Hammond can use Viagra (or mycoxafloppin) to ease jet-lag. What do normal sized people (who don't whiten their teeth) use?

Did El Reg not get any awards for finding out important things like the speed of sheep in a vacuum or who is the toughest ever (CN!)?

I found the cannonical source for the rats distinguishing japanese from dutch but not backwards.

http://www.apa.org/releases/speech_article.pdf

Interestingly (for some values of interesting) rats trained on Dutch (fwd) could differntiate it from Japanese (fwd) but rats trained on Jap could not spot Dutch. Backwards confused them all. As far as a quick scan of the paper showed they did not train rats on Dutch or Japanese backwards. Perhaps I can get funding for that one.

But still no ducks or German found, where did that meme come from, wishful thinking at the reg ?

"But our favourite has to be the work done in Argentina, which determined that viagra can help hamsters recover from jetlag."

....

"We are a little confused tough, as to how you would spot a jetlagged hamster."

Easy. They look extremely happy to see you.