The Ig Nobel Prize

Beetles love beer bottles. They love them so much they make love to them, provided the bottles are brown and have a particular form of "stipples" on them. That's what scientists Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz discovered thirty years ago. For this discovery they were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Biology.

The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded by "Annals of Improbable Research", which, if you can believe it is a science humor magazine. They have come to be seen as an "alternative" version to the rather more sober Nobel awards announced in Sweden next week.

Here is a list of the prizes and the winners. Note that a winner of the mathematics prize is our old friend, Harold Camping, whose end-of-the-world prediction failed to come true this year (wait till next year).

Physiology Prize: Anna Wilkinson, from the University of Lincoln, and colleagues for their study in the journal Current Zoology titled "No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise".
Chemistry Prize: A team led from Shiga University, Japan, that determined the ideal density of airborne wasabi to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm. Patent pending.
Medicine Prize: Shared by two teams whose independent research jointly established that people make better decisions about some kinds of things, but worse decisions about other kinds of things‚ when they have a strong urge to urinate.
Psychology Prize: Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo, Norway, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.
Literature Prize: John Perry of Stanford University, US, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.
Biology Prize: Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle. The pair have published two papers on the topic.
Physics Prize: Philippe Perrin and colleagues for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.
Peace Prize: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armoured tank.
Public Safety Prize: John Senders of the University of Toronto, Canada, for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him.
Mathematics Prize: Shared by a group of doom-mongers for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations -

• Dorothy Martin of the US who predicted the world would end in 1954
• Pat Robertson of the US who predicted the world would end in 1982
• Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the US who predicted the world would end in 1990
• Lee Jang Rim of Korea who predicted the world would end in 1992
• Credonia Mwerinde of Uganda who predicted the world would end in 1999
• Harold Camping of the US who predicted the world would end in 1994 and then later in 2011