It’s the season for Nobel Prizes. Winners in Medicine and Physics have already been announced on Monday and Tuesday. And in the coming days the winners in Chemistry, Literature, Peace and Literature will be unveiled. But every year, since 1991, a few days ahead of the prestigious Nobel Prize winners are announced, an equally important — though funny —event, held at the Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, Massachusetts. It honours far more ignoble achievements in scientific research that “first make people laugh, and then make them think”.

Called Ig Nobel Prizes, a play on the word ‘ignoble’ and ‘Nobel’ from Alfred Nobel, it is a parody of Nobel Prizes and is organised by the scientific humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research. It is a publication that highlights real research from around the world that might be overlooked, but that still has the potential to make people think.

It is popularly believed that yawning is contagious, not just in humans but also in other primates. But Anna Wilkinson of the University of Lincoln, UK, did not believe in that theory and spent years in studying the behaviour of tortoises. Her research and the paper, titled: No evidence of contagious yawning in the red-footed tortoise, written along with Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl and Ludwig Huber from the Messerli Institute in Vienna, Austria, won the Ig Nobel in physiology.

The Ig Nobel in biology went to a team of researchers in Australia, who discovered that a certain type of male Australian beetle (the buprestid beetle) would readily mate with a certain type of Australian beer bottle. It was while drinking his morning coffee during a field study in Western Australia, Gwynne noticed that male buprestid beetles had a peculiar attraction to a type of “stubby” (short-necked) brown beer bottle lying by the side of the road. “There were a lot of these discarded bottles about, and nearly every one had a much smaller male beetle attempting to mate with it,” he writes.

For Chemistry, a team of researchers from Japan won the prize for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm. These researchers sniffed around for long to find functional alerting smells that could be sprayed into the air to rouse anyone with a working nose, including the deaf.

From animals to humans, the Ig Nobel award for Psychology went to a researcher who wanted to understand the everyday meaning of why people sigh. According to his work, published in the paper titled: Is a sigh ‘just a Sigh’? Sighs as emotional signals and responses to a difficult task, people perceive sighing as an indication that a person is sad, when in reality it just means the person has given up.

And the one for Medicine is even more curious. The prize went to a pair of research teams, from Netherlands and the UK, which found that people make better decisions about some things, and worse decisions about other things, when they have a strong urge to urinate. Their findings are published in the paper titled: Inhibitory spill over: Increased urination urgency facilitates impulse control in unrelated domains.

The literature prize went to retired Stanford University professor 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. Former Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee won the Ig Nobel for peace in 1998 for his aggressively peaceful explosions of atomic bombs. He shared the price with Pakistan’s former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

rejijohn@mydigitalfc.com