Researchers from the University of Greenwich are celebrating after their improbable device made it into a poll of top university discoveries over the past 60 years. They devised an artificial cow that uses a chemical attractant to lure in tsetse flies, which are then killed by insecticide. The mock bovine, first trialled in the 1980s, is thought to have saved thousands of lives in Africa by lowering the number of cases of ‘sleeping sickness’, which is spread by the fly.

The mooish intervention came eighth in a poll of UK academics asked to vote for the best scientific breakthrough to come from a UK university since 1950. Top of the list, quite predictably, is Watson and Crick’s determination of the DNA double helix. The list also features the contraceptive pill, embryonic stem cells and genetic fingerprinting.

See the full list here.