The 2011 Ig Nobel Prize champions were declared Thursday in a service held at Harvard University's Sanders Theatre. Champions of the yearly award for unlikely scientific research went to such unlikely research as why a certain beetle mates with a certain type of beer bottle and why discus throwers get light headed from spinning around. Source of article: Ig Nobel Awards honor the wackiest scientific studies of the year

Laugh and then think

The Ig Nobel awards have been happening for 21 years to be able to make fun of the Nobel Prize. Any trivial scientific achievement will be honored in this. The goals of the awards are to “first make individuals laugh, and then make them think." The awards are sponsored by the humorous scientific journal, Annals of Unlikely Research. There are hats, paper planes, children and much more during this event. In the scientific community, it has really become a goal to win this award. The champions this year went to Harvard to accept the prizes. They paid for it all on their own.

Looking at champions in 2011

Anna Wilkinson of the University of Lincoln got the physiology prize this year for her research document called "No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise." A team from Shiga University in Japan won the chemistry award. This was done by creating a fire alarm system that wakes people up by throwing wasabi horse radish at them in perfect amounts. The medicine award was shared by two teams, one European and one American, for determining that the urge to urinate causes us to make better decisions about some things and worse decisions about others. Research was done by Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo as to why humans sigh, which got him the psychology prize. A document called "The Theory of Structured Procrastination," which talks all about getting things done and putting things off at the same time, got Stanford University’s John Perry the literature award. Since Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz studied how beetles really like to mate with a bumpy Australian beer container, they were given the biology award. The reason discus throwers get light headed was discussed by Philippe Perrin, which got him the physics award. Mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, Arturas Zuokas, got the peace award. This was done because he figured out flattening cars with an armored tank solved the illegally parked cars problem. John Senders of the University of Toronto won the public safety prize for his research on the hazards of maneuvering on a significant highway while the sun visor repeatedly flaps in the driver's face. The mathematics award was shared by a host of doom predictors from Pat Robertson to Elizabeth Clare. The judges say that these people proved individuals need to be more cautious with mathematical calculations since they all falsely predicted the end of the world.

Conclusion of the service

The end of the ceremony came. It ended with a comment from Annals of Improbably Research’s editor Marc Abrahams: "If you didn't win an Ig Nobel award tonight -- and especially if you did -- better luck next year." In the near future, in Sweden, the real Nobel Award service will happen.

Citations

Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/29/ig-nobel-award-winners-do_n_987797.html Improbable.com: http://improbable.com/ig/winners/ BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15117051