A spoof of the even more prestigious Nobel prizes will be announced next month. The 10 prizes are organized by the humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research and awarded at Harvard University.

The joint astronomy and biology prize was awarded to Eric Warrant's team at the University of Lund for coming up with a finding that dung beetles navigate using the stars.

The researchers had been studying the ability of beetles to roll their balls of dung in straight lines by using the moon as guide. A pattern of polarized light around the moon was used by them for the study.

Warrant said that in a moonless night they noticed that the beetles were able to orient in straight lines.

At first they were shocked and worried that their previous experiments were wrong. But then, they figured out by looking up that broad stripe of light acted as a compass cue to help them navigate. The broad stripe of light is actually the Milky Way.

According to Warrant, birds and moths may also use the Milky Way to navigate. He said, "The principles we are uncovering in dung beetle navigation may be useful in the design of autonomous vehicles and robots, although this is likely to be few years off".