Beetle's mating with beer bottles scoop award
Boffins who noticed certain Australian beetles will try to have sex with discarded beer bottles have won a scientific prize.Entomologists Professor Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for their discovery about buprestid Beetles.
They'd discovered the male beetle would try to mate with beer bottles -- but only brown ones with bobbly bits on them.
This was enough to bag the boffins the Ig Nobel Prize, which celebrates research which makes you laugh and then think.
Other winners on the night included the team who devised a wasabi fire alarm for deaf people and a group who looked at why discus throwers get dizzy.
The winners in full:
PHYSIOLOGY PRIZE: Anna Wilkinson for the study "No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise."
CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Shiga University 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.
MEDICINE PRIZE: Two teams who demonstrated 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.
PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.
LITERATURE PRIZE: John Perry of Stanford University, 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.
BIOLOGY PRIZE: Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle
PHYSICS PRIZE: Philippe Perrin and colleagues for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.
MATHEMATICS PRIZE: Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.
PEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.
PUBLIC SAFETY PRIZE: John Senders of the University of Toronto, for 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.
LINKS
Ig Nobel
PHYSIOLOGY PRIZE: Anna Wilkinson for the study "No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise."
CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Shiga University 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.
MEDICINE PRIZE: Two teams who demonstrated 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.
PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.
LITERATURE PRIZE: John Perry of Stanford University, 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.
BIOLOGY PRIZE: Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle
PHYSICS PRIZE: Philippe Perrin and colleagues for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.
MATHEMATICS PRIZE: Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.
PEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.
PUBLIC SAFETY PRIZE: John Senders of the University of Toronto, for 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.
LINKS
Ig Nobel
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