Tonight, in Vancouver, the annual Improbable Research show was held at the AAAS Annual Meeting, which took place in the Mackenzie Room of the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel.

Every year, ten IG Nobel Prizes are handed out to honor achievements in the sciences that sound humorous and generally make people laugh, but then make them think. The awards are presented by Nobel laureates.

Pictured is Dr. Elena Bodnar, a 2009 Ig Nobel winner, demonstrating her brassieres that convert into a pair of protective face masks. She is being assisted by Nobel laureates (from left to right): Wolfgang Ketterle, Orhan Pamuk, and Paul Krugman. [Photo credit: Alexey Eliseev, from the Improbable Research Website]

Some examples of the prize winners from 2011:

  • 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 (check out the YouTube Video).
  • Chemistry Prize: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami 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.
  • Literature Prize: John Perry of Stanford University, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination.
  • Medicine Prize: Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop, and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff  for demonstrating 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.

The 2012 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will be held on Thursday, September 20, in the Sanders Theater, Harvard University.