THE IGNOBEL PRIZE WINNERS[VIDEO]

The 21st annual Ig Nobel Prizes, a celebration of unique and outlandish science achievements that “make people laugh, and then make them think.”  The winning scientists traveled from around the world to Harvard University to accept prizes for their research — science that would normally go unrecognized.  The ceremony was webcast live on YouTube.  Here’s a recording of it along with the winners list, which includes

LITERATURE PRIZE
John Perry of Stanford University, USA, 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.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE
Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo, Norway, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.

BIOLOGY PRIZE
Darryl Gwynne (of Canada and Australia and the USA) and David Rentz (of Australia and the USA) for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle.

PHYSICS PRIZE
Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne and Bruno Ragaru (of France), and Herman Kingma (of The Netherlands), 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, Canada, 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.

(ScientificAmerican)