The winners of the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize -- which awards spectacularly bizarre, trivial and downright dangerous science that "first makes people laugh, and then makes them think" -- have been announced.
The prizes are handed out at Harvard University by genuine Nobel laureates, and go to scientists carrying out real work. But to lay people, their scientific ambitions can seem a little bonkers -- like the multinational team who finally established that there is "no evidence of contagious yawning" in red-footed tortoises.
Or the European team won the physics prize "for determining why discus throwers become dizzy and why hammer throwers don't," or the psychology professor from the University of Oslo who investigated "why, in everyday life, people sigh."
Darryl Gwynne of the University of Toronto and his Australian colleague David Rentz, grabbed the biology prize for a paper titled " Beetles on the Bottle: Male Buprestids Mistake Stubbies for Females." The entomological survey found that Australian jewel beetles try to mate with empty beer bottles, sometimes until their death.
In medicine, a team lead by Mirjam A. Tuk from the University of Twente did all-important research into how holding your bladder when you desperately need a pee can impair or improve your brain power.
In the paper's abstract, the authors write, "We show that urination urgency correlates with improved performance on color naming but not word meaning trials," and, "we show that higher levels of bladder control result in an increasing ability to resist more immediate temptations in monetary decision making." Sometimes, holding it in can be good for you it seems.
Other prizes included public safety for a Toronto researcher who studied driver performance "on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him," and the Japanese team who had to figure out "the ideal density of airborne wasabi to awaken sleeping people in case of fire."
A whole group of people won the mathematics prize for (poorly) predicting that the world would come to an end in 1954, 1982, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1997, 1999 and 2011 (the jury's still out on that last one, to be fair). The peace prize went to a Lithuanian mayor who solved the problem of illegally parked cars by crushing them under an armored tank.
Finally, the literature award went to John Perry for his theory of procrastination. "To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important."
sited by wired.uk/ Story Written by Mark Brown/ Edited by Duncan Geere
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