They may celebrate pointless science, but the Ig Nobel Prizes still take us to the point of plenty of returns. Tech Sunday enters the mad lab

Technology and science can be pointless. Take fireworks, for instance – they are a waste of money, but the colourful chemical webs they spin in the sky are tantamount to visual epiphanies.

As for the refrigerated glove compartment in your car, you’ve never used it, have you? But it certainly feels good to have it.

And remember the science experiments we used to conduct at school. There wasn’t much point in watching liquids change colour in a beaker, but it still made us fall in love with science.

Organised by the scientific humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate the most bizarre scientific research, such as a study of yawning tortoises or research into how human behaviour changes when we need to go to the toilet. The latter research – which concluded that having a bladder at its bursting point reduces your attention span – was awarded this year’s Ig Nobel prize for medicine.

Other research awarded at the 2011 Ig Nobel Prizes was a wasabi-based alarm system, an analysis of why people sigh, and a study on why discus throwers become dizzy whereas hammer throwers do not.

The ‘Nobel’ in the awards ceremony isn’t a gimmick – held at Harvard University, the prizes are handed out by real Nobel winners. Moreover, the Ig Nobel Prizes are very well respected in the world of science.

As for the candidates, they’re not as mad as they appear to be. In fact, physicist Andre Geim, who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics, had also won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000.

Bizarre as it may be, the kind of imaginative research celebrated by the Ig Nobel Prizes still makes us think, while laughing of course. More importantly, it stokes our terest in science and technology.

2011 Ig Nobel Prize winners

Physiology
Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl and Ludwig Huber for their study on contagious yawning in tortoises.

Chemistry
Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakemi for their invention of a wasabi-based alarm.

Medicine
Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and LukWarlop for showing people make worse decisions when their bladder is full.

Psychology
Karl Halvor Teigen for trying to understand why people sigh.

Literature
John Perry for his theory of structured procrastination.

Biology
Daryll Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that an Australian species of beetle is inclined to mate with a particular Australian beer bottle.

Mathematics
Dorothy Martin for predicting the world would end in 1954. Martin shared the prize with other mathematicians who falsely predicted the end of the world.

Peace
Arturas Zuokas, mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania for showing that illegal parking can be solved by running over illegally parked cars with an armoured tank.

Physics
Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru and Herman Kingma for trying to understand why discus throwers become dizzy whereas hammer throwers do not.

Public safety
John Senders for determining that obstructing a driver’s line of sight with a visor while driving is unsafe.