The Ig Nobel awards are an annual, tongue-in-cheek version of their namesake, recognizing researchers for ridiculous-sounding papers ("How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done") and obscure areas of study (why do certain Australian beetles continuously attempt to mate with discarded beer bottles, even as ants chew off their genitalia?). Sometimes, the awards editorialize on the year's news: Erroneous doomsday predictor Harold Camping won this year's mathematics prize "for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations".
The best Ig Nobel winners, though, start with a silly question and end up with an interesting answer. This year, the prize in medicine went to two different research groups pursuing the same burning question: What happens to our cognitive abilities when we really, really have to pee?
One paper examined subjects' speed in a memory-based test. The adult subjects watched playing cards flipping over on a screen and ...
