Ig Nobel Prizes

Science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research held its annual awards ceremony at Harvard University's Sanders Theatre yesterday. Among the winners was the mayor of Vilnius in Lithuania, Arturas Zuokas, who won the Peace Prize for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars could be solved by squashing them with an armoured tank. A Japanese team won the Chemistry Prize for working out how to use pungent horseradish in a fire alarm system. And Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz won the Biology Prize for discovering that an Australian beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle until it falls off, exhausted. Click the title link to see the full list of winners.