Dec 5 2011

With the sole aim to celebrate the unusual, admire the imaginative and spur people’s interest in science, medicine and technology in fun way, each year Ig Nobel Prizes are given to honor the achievements of people who with their sheer talent make people first laugh and then make them think!

The Ig Nobel Awards come with little cash more cachet to honor the people behind research projects that make people laugh and think. Keeping the trend of rewarding such ingenious minds, the Ig Nobel awards 2011 were given just recently.

If you all know Ig Nobel awards are given out in ten fields for strange scientific achievements but with a twist, only those were considered that were satirical and promise to leave people smiling and wondering. From medicine to physics, literature, psychology and similar the prizes were given for different categories.

The 2011 Ig Nobel winners were given at Harvard University by the Annals of Improbable Research Magazine. Here is the list of award winners of this year Ig Noble Prize. The great minds deserve to be applauded so sit back and enjoy reading about them and their work that made them deserving enough to beat others and finally receive the award.

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Peace

Arturas Zuokas, mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania for his heavy-handed way of dealing with parking offenders.

Vilnius, Lithuania apparently has a big car parking issue as people keep flouting parking laws. Arturas Zuokas has shown that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be simply be solved by running them over with an armored tank.

Psychology

Karl Teigen for his research on sighing.

Ever wonder why people sigh? Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo in the quest to get the answer to this question did a research and found out that people sigh when they feel that they have “given up” on something but think that other people’s sighs are a sign of sadness.

Mathematics

Dorothy Martin, Pat Robertson, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Lee Jang Rim, Credonia Mwerinde, Harold Camping.

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), and Harold Camping of the US (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 but subsequently changed the doomsday date to October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful while making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

Literature

John Perry for his theory of procrastination

John Perry researched on procrastination and reached to the conclusion that one must work on something important in order to avoid doing something that’s even more important; this is the key to achieve success. He reached this after scrutinizing his tendency to avoid seemingly important duties. This made him figure out that while he was procrastinating, he was actually productively diverting. John. Perry advises procrastinators to make a list of the many things they hope to accomplish, and then place them according to their priority.

Chemistry

Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami for their wasabi alarm.

How do you wake a deaf person in the middle of the night in case of a fire? The fire-alarm system comprising horseradish invented by Japanese researchers earned them the Ig Nobel prize. Constructing 50,000-yen (Rs56975) wasabi alarm by testing hundreds of different types of odors including the smell of rotten eggs, made these ingenious brains win the award in Chemistry.

Medicine

Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, Paul Maruff, Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop for studying the effects of holding in urine.

Every now and then we face the situation when we have no other option than to hold our urine but did you know that if you have to pee urgently and you can’t for whatever reason, it can adversely affect your cognitive function? The need to urinate causes temporary decreases in the function of attentional and working memory, according to findings of a recent research done by European scientists. Also, the study reveals that Ig Nobel prize-winning research also reveals that people who have better control over their bladders also make better financial decisions.

Physiology

Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl and Ludwig Huber for their study No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise.

We all know that yawns are transmittable in humans but if you think it’s just limited to human beings then you are wrong. The contagiousness of the yawn is not just limited to human species like dogs are also likely to ‘catch’ yawns from their species and surprisingly humans too. But the behavior of tortoises refutes the ‘contagious yawn theory’, for which the reason was found out by Wilkinson and her colleagues. The reason is that tortoises don’t yawn after seeing their counterparts do so, thus refuting the notion that the spread of the yawn is a reflex physical action.

Public Safety

Candian Psychologist John Senders for his experiments which simulate driving on a highway by a blind driver.

John Senders did an experiment, in which the driver’s face was blinded while he drove on a major highway. Taking a spin on an eight-lane highway while wearing an unusual hat with a visor that intermittently impeded his vision was quite risky. The goal of this experiment was to figure out how long a driver can afford to look away from the windscreen while managing to drive safely.

Physics

Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru and Herman Kingma for trying to determine why discus throwers become dizzy, while hammer throwers don’t.

The research was undertaken by European team that explains when hammer throwers use spotting techniques to keep their balance it prevents them from getting dizzy. Whereas, hurlers move their heads in a manner that may induce motion sickness and hence feel lightheaded.

Biology

Daryll Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that certain kinds of beetles try to mate with certain kinds of Australian beer bottles.

Did you know that Beetles mate with beer bottles? Certain Australian beetles will attempt to mate with specific used bottles brown ones with bobbly bits. The study of buprestid beetles by Daryll Gwynne and David Rentz’ discovered that the insects tried to mate with brown stubbies left by the side of the road.