2011 Ig Nobels honor research into why people sigh, beetles that mate with beer bottles

30.09.2011
Research lauded at the 21st Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony Thursday night ran the gamut from discovering beetles that mate with beer bottles to understanding the effect having to pee has on thinking.

Sponsored by The Annals of Improbable Research, the prizes celebrate research that may have been widely overlooked, but meet the criteria that it first should make you laugh, then learn.

While the theme of the evening’s event in Cambridge, Mass., was nominally chemistry, prizes in 10 disciplines including literature, psychology and physiology were also awarded.

WINNING:

HISTORY:

The ceremony included an opera in five acts about coffee, raffling off a date with 1998 Nobel Laureate Louis Ignarro and two periods when the audience threw paper airplanes at the stage for no apparent reason.