The 2011 Ig Nobel winners, awarded Thursday at Harvard University by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine:
PHYSIOLOGY: Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl and Ludwig Huber for their study "No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise."
CHEMISTRY: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami for their wasabi alarm.
MEDICINE: Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, Paul Maruff along with Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop for studying the effects of holding in urine.
PSYCHOLOGY: Karl Halvor Teigen for trying to understand why people sigh.
LITERATURE: John Perry for his theory of procrastination: 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: Daryll Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that certain kinds of beetles try to mate with certain kinds of Australian beer bottles.
PHYSICS: Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru and Herman Kingma for trying to determine why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.
MATHEMATICS: Assorted doomsday predictors throughout history for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.
PEACE: Arturas Zuokas for solving the problem of illegally parked cars by crushing them with an armored vehicle.
PUBLIC SAFETY: John Senders for his experiments in which a driver on a major highway repeatedly has a visor flapped down over his face.
