Humorous Research Wins Ig Nobel Prize 2024

Scientists who studied drunken worms, the swimming patterns of dead salmon, and using pigeons to control missiles were named at the 34th Ig Nobel Prize announcement ceremony.

The Ig Nobel Prizes, which honor unusual research that 'makes people laugh, then think,' were announced at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on September 12, according to the Guardian . The Annals of Improbable Research magazine co-hosted the event with MIT Press. The event included Nobel scholars announcing the awards, the winning scientist explaining the research topic in 24 seconds and concluding in seven words, and the familiar paper plane throwing. The winner was awarded 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars.

Research using pigeons to guide missiles to their target won this year's Ig Nobel Prize. (Photo: Inews).

Physiology

Japanese researchers became interested in whether people with breathing difficulties could benefit from anal oxygenation after noticing that some animals, such as loach fish, can use their intestines to breathe. They began the study during the Covid era when many hospitals were short of ventilators to support critically ill patients.

Experiments by the Ig Nobel Prize-winning physiology team showed that mice, rats, and pigs can absorb oxygen into their bloodstream when delivered via the rectum, thereby supporting normal breathing. In a 2021 paper published in Med, Takanori Takebe, a physician and scientist at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, and Ryo Okabe of Tokyo Medical and Dental University, describe how the intestinal airway offers a new way to help patients with respiratory problems.

Demographic

Dr Saul Newman of Oxford University won the Ig Nobel in demography for proving that many of the myths about extremely long-lived people come from places where people have short life expectancies, no birth certificates, and are rife with recordkeeping errors and pension fraud.

Anatomy

Professor Roman Khonsari, a maxillofacial surgeon at Necker-Enfants Malades University Hospital in Paris, and colleagues were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Anatomy for their global study of hair whorls. While most people have hair that grows in a clockwise direction on the scalp, their research found that the counterclockwise pattern is more common in the Southern Hemisphere.

The finding has drawn comparisons to tornadoes. Tornadoes tend to rotate in different directions in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. In their paper published in the Journal of Stomatology, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery , the team hypothesizes the Coriolis effect, which suggests that the Earth's rotation deflects winds to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere. Khonsari, however, doesn't think that's a viable theory.

Peace

The Ig Nobel Peace Prize went to the late American physiologist BF Skinner for exploring the feasibility of placing live pigeons on missiles to guide them to targets. The project was abandoned despite having perfect demonstrations, including a pigeon trained to target targets along the New Jersey coastline.

Botany

The Ig Nobel Prize in Botany was awarded to independent researchers Jacob White in the US and Felipe Yamashita at the University of Bonn in Germany for presenting evidence that a South American plant called Boquila trifoliolata can mimic the leaves of a fake plant it is placed next to, thereby concluding that "plant vision" is a viable hypothesis.

Medical

A team from Switzerland, Germany and Belgium, led by Lieven A. Schenk at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, won the Ig Nobel Prize in medicine for demonstrating that a placebo drug that causes painful side effects can be more effective in patients than a placebo drug that does not cause painful side effects.

Physics

The Ig Nobel Prize in physics honored biologist James C. Liao of the University of Florida for his comprehensive understanding of the swimming abilities of dead salmon.

Probability

A team of 50 researchers, led by František Bartoš of the University of Amsterdam, shared the Ig Nobel Prize in probability. They flipped 350,757 coins to test a hypothesis by Persi Diaconis, a former magician and professor of statistics at Stanford University. Their research proved Diaconis's prediction that a lightly tossed coin is more likely to land on the same side as before it was tossed.

Chemistry

The chemistry prize was awarded to a team at the University of Amsterdam consisting of Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen who used chromatography to distinguish between drunk and non-drunk worms.

Biology

The Ig Nobel Prize in Biology went to the late American scientists Fordyce Ely and William Petersen for their 1940 study of factors that affect milk production in cattle. In a paper published in the journal Animal Science, they described placing a cat on a cow and exploding a paper bag to see if the milk flow would change. The frightened cows seemed to produce less milk.