The WEIRDEST Nobel Prizes ever!

The winners of the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize recieved their awards recently.

The Ig Nobel Prizes are given out in ten fields for quirky and strange scientific achievements and are considered to be a satirical take on the prestigious Noble Prize.

The Medicine Prize went to Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff for demonstrating 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.

The Peace Prize went to Arturas Zuokas for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armoured tank.

The Physics Prize went to Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne and Bruno Ragaru and Herman Kingma for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.

The Mathematics Prize went to Dorothy Martin, Pat Robertson, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Lee Jang Rim, Credonia Mwerinde and Harold Camping for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

A University of Toronto Mississauga professor won the Ig Nobel Prize after he studied how an Australian jewel beetle died in the hot sun while trying to mate with a brown 'stubby' beer bottle, which he thought to be his female counterpart.

Darryl Gwynne, an international expert in behavioural ecology, and his Australian colleague David Rentz were awarded the prize, which is a parody of the Nobel Prizes, at Harvard University for their 1983 paper Beetles on the Bottle: Male Buprestids Mistake Stubbies for Females.

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

The Chemistry Prize went to Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of Japan, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.

The Psychology Prize went to Karl Halvor Teigen for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.

The Literature Prize went to John Perry 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.