At last, pointless science answers jimmy riddle

"It was a scientific question that Mirjam Tuk and her colleagues were bursting to answer. While psychology had revealed how human behaviour can be changed by all kinds of feelings, from sexual desire to hunger, an urgent issue had yet to be addressed. What happens to decision-making, the Dutch researchers wondered, when you really, really need the loo?

The team's conclusion — that people make better decisions about some things, and worse decisions about others — was rewarded last night with an Ig Nobel prize, in the annual awards that recognise research that "cannot or should not be reproduced".

At the ceremony at Harvard University yesterday, Dr Tuk and her collaborator Luk Warlop accepted the Medicine Prize, which they shared with Australian scientists who made a similar discovery.

The honours are given to science that "first makes people laugh and then makes them think", and were handed out by seven genuine Nobel laureates.

In Dr Tuk's study, published in the journal Psychological Science, 193 students were asked to take a battery of standard mental tests. They were then split into two groups, one of which was asked to drink five large glasses of water 45 minutes before the tests.

After being suitably primed with a need to relieve themselves, the students were better at identifying colours, but not at identifying the meanings of words.

People who hold off the need to urinate are also better able to resist the temptation to spend money — suggesting that avoiding the loo before a shopping trip might save you money. The Ig Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to a Japanese team led by Makoto Imai, of Shiga University of Medical Science, for their patented invention of an alarm that wakes people up by releasing a pungent wasabi spray.

The Physiology award went to an international team led by Anna Wilkinson, of the University of Lincoln, for an important paper published in Current Zoology entitled "No evidence of contagious yawning in the red-footed tortoise, Geochelone carbonaria".

The Peace Prize was won by Arturas Zuokas, the Mayor of Vilnius, in Lithuania, for his innovative and wholly effective crackdown on illegal parking. Mayor Zuokas took to the wheel of a tank, and ran over offending luxury cars.

Darrell Gwynne and David Rentz were honoured in the Biology category for their discovery that male buprestid beetles sometimes mistake beer bottles for females, and mate with them. A team led by Hernman Kingma, of Maastricht University, won the Physics prize for determining why discus throwers get dizzy, while hammer throwers do not.

The Psychology prize went to Karl Halvor Teigen, of the University of Oslo for research into understanding why people sigh.

John Perry, of Stanford University in California, won the Literature prize for developing a Theory of Structured Procrastination. It 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.""

From The Times (Thanks Susanne)