Zany science: Bursting bladder bags Ig Nobel
Prognosticators who predicted the end of the world and got it wrong, scientists who built a wasabi fire alarm, and researchers who studied how the urge to urinate affects decision-making were among the winners of spoof Ig Nobel prizes on Thursday.
The annual prizes, meant to entertain and encourage scientific research, are awarded by the Journal of Improbable Research as a whimsical counterpart to the Nobel Prizes.
Ig Nobels also went to researchers who found that the male buprestid beetle likes to copulate with Australian beer bottles called stubbies, and researchers who showed why discus throwers become dizzy and hammer throwers do not.
Former winners of the real Nobel prizes hand out the prizes at a ceremony held at Harvard University.
The medicine prize, won by a Dutch-Belgian-Australian team with 'Inhibitory Spillover', a probe into the age-old challenge of needing to pee at a busy moment.
The team investigated why "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", the awards citation said.
The chemistry prize went to Japanese researchers who invented a fire alarm that emits the pungent odor of wasabi, the sinus-clearing green paste served with sushi. "Wasabi odor is useful as a fire alarm to deaf people who failed to wake up with a conventional mode such as sound, vibration or flashing light," said Makoto Imai, professor of psychiatry at Shiga University of Medical Science.
The annual prizes, meant to entertain and encourage scientific research, are awarded by the Journal of Improbable Research as a whimsical counterpart to the Nobel Prizes.
Ig Nobels also went to researchers who found that the male buprestid beetle likes to copulate with Australian beer bottles called stubbies, and researchers who showed why discus throwers become dizzy and hammer throwers do not.
Former winners of the real Nobel prizes hand out the prizes at a ceremony held at Harvard University.
The medicine prize, won by a Dutch-Belgian-Australian team with 'Inhibitory Spillover', a probe into the age-old challenge of needing to pee at a busy moment.
The team investigated why "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", the awards citation said.
The chemistry prize went to Japanese researchers who invented a fire alarm that emits the pungent odor of wasabi, the sinus-clearing green paste served with sushi. "Wasabi odor is useful as a fire alarm to deaf people who failed to wake up with a conventional mode such as sound, vibration or flashing light," said Makoto Imai, professor of psychiatry at Shiga University of Medical Science.
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