AS contenders for the Nobel Prizes await next week's announcements from Stockholm, the 2011 Ig Nobel Laureates are celebrating already with coffee, chardonnay and paper aeroplanes.

The annual Ig Nobels, awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research, honour achievements that are funny, often pointless, yet strangely provocative.

"It's a spectacular year for Australia," AIR editor Marc Abrahams said. "Congratulations."

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While Australian laureate David Rentz was physically handed the Ig Nobel Prize in Biology ("for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle") by seven genuine Nobel laureates at Boston's Harvard University, fellow Australian winner Paul Maruff toasted his victory at a resort in far north Queensland.

"I was bemused when I heard the news, but it has cachet, " said Dr Maruff, a psychologist with CogState, a Melbourne firm specialising in designing clinical trials of drugs aimed at improving intellectual impairment.

Hence, his award-winning collaboration on the effects of a full bladder on decision-making.

According to his team's findings, having a really full bladder impairs decision-making.

"(We found) the degree you can't concentrate is much bigger than (having a blood alcohol level) of 0.05. It's worse than if you haven't slept in 24 hours," Dr Maruff said, adding that he and his US colleagues had conducted the trial on themselves.

"I suspect we'll be challenged by urine-change deniers mustered by the soft drink industry."

Other international teams were honoured last night for failed doomsday predictions: the wasabi fire alarm, the theory of structured procrastination and the absence of contagious yawning in the red-footed tortoise.

Others laureates investigated why people sigh, the lack of dizziness in hammer throwers, the effect of armoured tanks on illegally parked luxury cars and the dangers of driving with floppy windscreen visors.

"If you didn't win an Ig Nobel prize, and especially if you did, better luck next year," Mr Abrahams said.