With less than a month to go before the Nobel Prizes are handed out for the most worthy scientific discoveries of the preceding year, it would be remiss of The Register not to observe the honors conferred by the gong’s bratty little brother, the Ig Nobel Prize.
The satirical ceremony has been run annually since 1991 by the scientific humor mag Annals of Improbable Research, which serves the laudable goal of highlighting “research that makes people laugh… then think.” In other words, the quirky, trivial, inane, and insane.
It’s just a bit of absurdist fun – winners are awarded tacky trophies, this time a piece of paper saying they’ve won an Ig Nobel Prize, and the traditional 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars (a deprecated currency that had a penchant for hyperinflation), but actual Nobel laureates perform the prize-giving, and they looked thrilled to be there.
10 trillion dollar Zimbabwean bank note
You might recall previous Ig Nobel hits like how wombats poop cubes, the chap who LARPed as a badger, and the miraculous properties of bacon.
Thursday’s ceremony was special in that it marked a return to the award’s spiritual home of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after four years of taking place online thanks to the pandemic. This year’s theme was “Murphy’s Law” – cheered by the audience whenever mentioned, as is also tradition – and a particularly apt one at that given the typically chaotic proceedings.
The ten award winners are listed here for your very serious research purposes:
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Peace Prize: B F Skinner, for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles. “Pigeons in a Pelican,” American Psychologist, vol 15, no. 1, 1960.
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Botany Prize: Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants. “Boquila trifoliolata Mimics Leaves of an Artificial Plastic Host Plant,” Plant Signaling and Behavior, vol. 17, no. 1, 2022.
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Anatomy Prize: Marjolaine Willems et al, for studying whether the hair on the heads of most people in the northern hemisphere swirls in the same direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise?) as hair on the heads of most people in the southern hemisphere. “Genetic Determinism and Hemispheric Influence in Hair Whorl Formation,” Journal of Stomatology, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, vol. 125, no. 2, April 2024.
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Medicine Prize: Lieven A Schenk, Tahmine Fadai, and Christian Büchel, for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side-effects. “How Side Effects Can Improve Treatment Efficacy: A Randomized Trial,” Brain, vol. 147, no. 8, August 2024.
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Physics Prize: James C Liao, for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout. “Neuromuscular Control of Trout Swimming in a Vortex Street: Implications for Energy Economy During the Kármán Gait,” The Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 207, 2004.
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Physiology Prize: Ryo Okabe et al, for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus. “Mammalian Enteral Ventilation Ameliorates Respiratory Failure,” Med, vol. 2, June 11, 2021.
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Probability Prize: František Bartoš et al, for showing, both in theory and by 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as it started. “Fair Coins Tend to Land on the Same Side They Started: Evidence from 350,757 Flips,” arXiv 2310.04153, 2023.
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Chemistry Prize: Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen, for using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms. “Chromatographic Separation of Active Polymer-Like Worm Mixtures by Contour Length and Activity,” Science Advances, vol. 8, no. 23, 2022.
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Biology Prize: Fordyce Ely and William E Petersen, for exploding a paper bag next to a cat that’s standing on the back of a cow, to explore how and when cows spew their milk. “Factors Involved in the Ejection of Milk,” Journal of Dairy Science, vol. 3, 1941.
So who knew? The homing pigeon weapon from the Worms games had some grounding in actual science, and we will watch follow-up studies into butt breathing with great interest. It sure beats having tobacco smoke blown up one’s rectum, which was something doctors in the 1700s actually used to do to resuscitate the presumed dead – hence the phrase.
Thankfully, we’ve moved onto defibrillators. ®
