While the Nobel Prizes award humanity’s best and brightest in science and social contributions, the Ig Nobels honor the stranger end of the spectrum.

Since 1991, the Ig Nobel Awards have honored (with tongue firmly in cheek) those who might not exactly be considered the “best and brightest,” but who have performed research that “cannot, or should not, be reproduced.” For example, the winner of the Peace Prize in 2009′s Ig Nobels went to a Swiss research team for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full beer bottle or with an empty one.

The 2011 Ig Nobel winners were announced and honored late last month.

Biology
Daryll Gwynne and David Rentz. Gwynne and Rentz made a very curious discovery about certain insects. Female Australian jewel beetles cannot fly, but males can, and they roam the skies looking down for the shiny mating displays of females, trying to find the perfect mate. Unfortunately, the shiny yellowish-brown color of certain Aussie beer bottles matches the shiny yellowish-brown color of the female Australian jewel beetles, which results in males accidentally attempting to mate with garbage. Read more.

Chemistry
Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami. This Japanese group was looking for the perfect chemical to alert people to danger. The idea was that a fire alarm that released a highly noticeable chemical into the air, such as a sweet or unpleasant odor, would warn people much better than a loud sound. Enter wasabi. Or, more specifically, isothiocyanate, or mustard oil, the chemical that gives wasabi its signature sting. The group’s fire alarm releases roughly 10 parts per million of mustard oil into the air, causing anyone nearby to jerk at the smell, get watery eyes and hopefully get out of the path of the fire. Read more.

Mathematics
Dorothy Martin, Pat Robertson, Elizabeth Clare Prophet and Harold Camping. None of the “winners” of the 2011 Mathematic Ig Nobel showed up to collect their prize. Probably because it was the clearest case of mocking the recipients: all of them were false prophets proclaiming the end of the world.

Medicine
Two groups: Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby and Paul Maruff; and Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop. Two studies measured people’s abilities to function when they really had to go. Lewis, et al., forced their subjects to consume as much as 2.5 liters of water and then forbade them from relieving themselves until they’d completed cognitive tests. They discovered that an urgent, painful need to urinate is as debilitating as being intoxicated. Tuk, et al., gave their test subjects far less water, but studied how a non-urgent need to urinate can actually help you concentrate. Read more.

Psychology
Karl Halvor Teigen. Norwegian psychology professor Teigen decided to investigate sighs “to show [his students] that there are themes in psychology that have not been properly investigated” and to get them excited about performing research. Teigen developed multiple tests to see not only what people thought when those around them sigh, but also which methods are best to elicit sighs. As you might expect, he discovered that people sigh when they are frustrated and, more importantly, resigned to that frustration. Read more.

Physiology
Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl and Ludwig Huber. Similar to Teigen’s experiment, the physiology winners wanted to investigate contagious yawning. You might have noticed that when others around you yawn, you will often find yourself yawning. In fact, reading the word yawn alone might cause you to yawn. But not in red-footed tortoises! The red-footed tortoise is very social and lives in groups. The scientists trained one tortoise to yawn on cue, but none of the other tortoises seemed to respond in any way. The theory is that tortoises lack empathy, which may be the real source of contagious yawning. Read more.

Physics
Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru and Herman Klingman. No matter how long professional discus players practice, they usually get dizzy spinning. Hammer throwers, who spin to hurl a ball on a chain, don’t get dizzy. The two sports require a very similar spin (See here and here), so why do the similar motions affect the athletes differently? It turns out that hammer throwers “spot,” fixing their gaze at one specific point that they can focus on during their spin, similar to the way ballet dancers focus during a spin. Discus throwers move differently, preventing an effective spot, and leading to more instances of dizziness. Read more.

Public Safety
John Senders. In the 1960s, Senders, of the University of Toronto, drove around on variably crowded roads 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. Senders used the information to determine how much drivers need to pay attention to the road in order to drive safely. But the resulting paper landed with a giant thud and remained unnoticed until cell phones and handheld devices entered the mix and officials needed data about phone usage and the road. The video of the experiment is still pretty ridiculous. Read more.

Peace
Arturas Zuokas. Zuokas, mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, wanted a flashy way to show people that he would not tolerate illegally parked cars. And so he publicly destroyed a Mercedes parked in a bike lane by running it over with a tank.

Literature
John Perry. If you have trouble getting things done, perhaps you can use Perry’s Theory of Structured Procrastination, which concludes: “To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.” Read more.

Earlier: A Year of Odd, Dumb and Strange Things

Resources

Improbable Research
Ig Nobel Prizes

IgNobel Prize Winner: The beetle and the beer bottle, a tragic love story
Scicurious Brain Blog (Scientific American), Sept. 30, 2011

IgNobel Prize Winner: Safety in Smell
Scicurious Brain Blog (Scientific American), Sept. 30, 2011

IgNobel Prize Winner: You might have a better time saving your spare change if you REALLY need to pee
Scicurious Brain Blog (Scientific American), Sep 30, 2011

IgNobel Prize Winner: A kiss is just a kiss, but is a sigh ever just a sigh?
Scicurious Brain Blog (Scientific American), Oct. 1, 2011

IgNobel Prize Winner: If you yawn, your pet tortoise don’t care
Scicurious Brain Blog (Scientific American), Sept. 30, 2011

IgNobel Prize Winner: Dizziness from discus throwing is due to undue spinning
Scicurious Brain Blog (Scientific American), Oct. 4, 2011

IgNobel Prize Winner: The power of effective procrastination
Scicurious Brain Blog (Scientific American), Oct. 2, 2011

Ig Nobel Prize Winners Make Hilarious Contributions to Science
by Natalie Wolchover
Life’s Little Mysteries, Sept. 29, 2011