Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology bagged this year’s physics prize for analysing the biological principle that almost all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds, plus or minus 13 seconds.

The annual prizes, meant to entertain and encourage global research and innovation, are awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research as a whimsical counterpart to the Nobel Prizes, which will be announced next month.

If you cracked a smile at any of them and wondered what else science needs to investigate, or even how it goes about deciding what does and doesn’t warrant investigation, the awards achieved their objective: to make people laugh and think. The awards are physically handed out by genuine Nobel Laureates. Yang and her team hope that their findings, published in the journal PNAS, inspire smarter engineering for water tanks and reservoirs as well as fire hoses and water-filled backpacks.

Australian scientists have been awarded the Ig Nobel prize in chemistry for making a device that can un-boil the boiled egg. The findings, according to the researchers from the University of California Irvine, have effects that go beyond kitchen use. The VFD could be used to fix misfolded proteins that are produced by recombined bacteria, for example, and has already been shown to improve the potency of a common cancer drug fourfold.

Nashville Researchers who exactly researched the results of notable sucking, the universal using of the word “right?” and in what way poorly bee stings injure on different places of the human body were really among the winners with this year’s Ig Nobel recognition for laughable science successes.

Other teams earned prizes for attaching a weighted stick to a chicken’s rear end to demonstrate how dinosaurs might have walked and for showing that acute appendicitis can be diagnosed by how much pain a patient feels when driven over speed bumps.

Entomologist Justin Schmidt won the physiology prize for allowing himself to be stung by more than 200 bees in different parts of the body to learn which locations are the most painful.

The management prize went to a group who found that children who experience (but aren’t harmed by) natural disasters tend to take more risks as business leaders.