Buying a house? Getting married? Drink a few glasses of water so your bladder is moderately full. Chances are you’ll make the right decision. But if you are dying for a pee you may find yourself with a roof full of dry rot you hadn’t noticed, or a spouse you hate. The Ig Nobel prizes for science with a smile were awarded on Monday night at Harvard University in Cambridge USA. De Volkskrant and Nrc were amused.

Waterlogged
You wouldn’t be alone in thinking that meat eaters-are-bastards professor doctor Diederik Stapel had struck again but no, this is proper science. A Dutch-Belgian team found the proof to back up the fact that people who have drunk a couple of glasses of water are more likely to make the right long-term decision. For instance, when given the choice of receiving €10 the next morning or €30 three days later, the moderately waterlogged guinea pigs chose the latter.
An American-Australian team found that people who were desperate for a pee were likely to make hasty decisions and regret them afterwards. Both teams shared the Ig Nobel prize for Medicine for finding out that decision making is influenced by the state of one’s bladder.
It wasn’t the only Dutch triumph: University of Maastricht’s Herman Kingma shared in the Ig Nobel for Physics by explaining how it is that discus throwers get dizzy and hammer throwers don’t.
Useful science
Most Ig Nobel research is meant to be just that: daft, why do beetles attempt to mate with beer bottles of a certain brand or why do people sigh being among some of the research on offer. But there is some serious and useful science too. Another winning team came up with a fire alarm for deaf people using the pungent smell of wasabi. And in 2006 research that proved that mosquitoes are attracted not only to smelly feet but to smelly Limburg cheese lead to Africans using traps filled with bits of cheese to catch the malaria causing creatures.
Peace
The most popular non-scientific but very effective contribution came from the mayor of Vilnius. His city was plagued by people parking wherever they felt like. His solution was to drive over one particularly expensive car with a tank. He then put the footage on Youtube and leant back to see parking offences plummet. He was given the Ig Nobel prize for peace.