Scientists researching drunken worms, the swimming patterns of dead salmon, and using pigeons to guide missiles were among those recognized at the 34th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.
The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, which honors unusual research that “makes people laugh, then think,” was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on September 12, according to The Guardian. The event was co-hosted by the journal Annals of Improbable Research and MIT Press. It featured Nobel laureates announcing the awards, winning researchers explaining their work in 24 seconds, and concluding with a familiar paper airplane toss. Winners received a prize of 10 trillion Zimbabwe dollars.
Research using pigeons to guide missiles accurately won this year’s Ig Nobel Prize. (Photo: Inews).
Physiology
Japanese researchers were intrigued to explore whether individuals experiencing breathing difficulties could benefit from oxygen pumped in through the rectum, after observing that some animals, such as eels, can use their intestines to breathe. They began their study during the COVID-19 pandemic when many hospitals faced shortages of ventilators for severely ill patients.
The experiment conducted by the Ig Nobel-winning physiology team showed that mice, rats, and pigs could absorb oxygen into their bloodstream when administered rectally, thereby aiding normal respiration. In a paper published in the journal Med in 2021, Takanori Takebe, a physician and scientist at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, along with Ryo Okabe from Tokyo Medical and Dental University, described how this intestinal breathing method could offer a new solution for patients with respiratory issues.
Demography
Dr. Saul Newman from the University of Oxford won the Ig Nobel Prize in demography for demonstrating that many rumors about exceptionally long-lived individuals originated from places where life expectancy is short, lacking birth certificates, and riddled with record-keeping errors and pension fraud.
Anatomy
Professor Roman Khonsari, a maxillofacial surgeon at Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris, and his colleagues received the Ig Nobel Prize in anatomy for their global study of hair whorls. While hair on the scalp typically grows clockwise in most individuals, their research found that counterclockwise whorls were more common in the Southern Hemisphere.
This discovery led to comparisons with tornadoes, which tend to spin in different directions in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. In a paper published in the Journal of Stomatology, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, the research team hypothesized about the Coriolis effect, suggesting that the Earth’s rotation causes winds to curve to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere. However, Khonsari did not consider this a plausible hypothesis.
Peace
The Ig Nobel Peace Prize went to the late American psychologist B.F. Skinner for investigating the feasibility of placing live pigeons on missiles to guide them to targets. The project was abandoned despite having a perfect proof of concept, including a pigeon trained to aim at targets along the New Jersey coastline.
Botany
The Ig Nobel Prize in botany was awarded to independent researcher Jacob White in the U.S. and Felipe Yamashita from the University of Bonn in Germany for providing evidence that the South American plant Boquila trifoliolata can mimic the leaves of the plants it grows next to, concluding that “plant vision” is a plausible hypothesis.
Medicine
A research team from Switzerland, Germany, and Belgium, led by Lieven A. Schenk from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, won the Ig Nobel Prize in medicine for demonstrating that placebo treatments that caused painful side effects could be more effective in patients than placebos without painful side effects.
Physics
The Ig Nobel Prize in physics recognized biologist James C. Liao from the University of Florida for his comprehensive study of the swimming capabilities of dead salmon.
Probability
A group of 50 researchers, led by František Bartoš from the University of Amsterdam, shared the Ig Nobel Prize in probability. They flipped 350,757 coins to test the hypothesis of Persi Diaconis, a former magician and professor of statistics at Stanford University. Their research confirmed Diaconis’s prediction that coins tossed lightly are more likely to land on the same side they started on.
Chemistry
The Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to a research team from the University of Amsterdam, including Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen, for using chromatography to distinguish between drunk and sober worms.
Biology
The Ig Nobel Prize in biology went to the late American scientists Fordyce Ely and William Petersen for their 1940 research into factors affecting milk production in livestock. In a paper published in the journal Animal Science, they described placing a cat on a cow’s back and popping a paper bag to see if it affected the flow of milk. The frightened cows appeared to produce less milk.
