The 34th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, which took place less than a month before the actual Nobel Prizes were announced, was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was organized by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine website with the goal of making people laugh and think.
A study examining the feasibility of using pigeons to guide missiles and a study examining the swimming abilities of dead fish were among the winners Thursday of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes, an award given for comical scientific achievements.
The 34th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, which took place less than a month before the actual Nobel Prizes were announced, was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and organized by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine's website to make people laugh and think. The winners received a transparent box containing historical items related to Murphy's Law - the main topic of the evening - and a nearly worthless $10 trillion bill from Zimbabwe. The awards were given by the real Nobel laureates.
"While some politicians have tried to portray things that make sense as crazy, scientists have discovered things that sound crazy but make a lot of sense," said Mark Abrahams, host of the ceremony and editor of the magazine, in an email interview.
The ceremony began with Case Molliker, winner of the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in Biology, who gave safety instructions. Moliker won the award for research documenting the existence of homosexual necrophilia in male ducks.
After that, someone came on stage wearing a yellow target on his chest and a plastic mask over his face. He was soon overwhelmed by people from the crowd who threw paper airplanes at him.
A team of researchers demonstrated during a performance that many mammals are able to breathe through the anus, and received the 2024 Hague Nobel Prize in Physiology at a ceremony held at MIT, Cambridge, Mass., on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. Credit: AP Photo/Steven Senne
Winners were honored in 10 categories, including the Peace Prize and the Anatomy Prize. Among the winners were scientists who showed that a vine from Chile mimics the shapes of artificial plants nearby and another study that tested whether the direction of hair in people in the northern hemisphere is the same as in people in the southern hemisphere.
The full list of winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes:
- Physiology: Awarded to a Japanese team of researchers for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anus. The study was designed to test whether it is possible to treat respiratory failure using this method.
- demography: Awarded to Dr. Saul Newman of the University of Oxford for research showing that claims of people living unusually long come from places with short life spans, a lack of birth certificates, and incorrect records.
- anatomy: Awarded to Prof. Romain Hounsari from France and his team for global research that showed that the curl direction of the hair on the scalp tends to be clockwise, with a difference between the northern and southern hemispheres.
- Peace: Awarded to the late winner B.P. Skinner, an American psychologist, for researching the feasibility of guiding missiles with the help of pigeons. The project was abandoned, despite the success of the demonstration.
- botany: Awarded to Jacob White (USA) and Felipe Yamashita (Germany) for research showing that the plant Boquila trifoliolata mimics the shape of the leaves of artificial plants placed next to it, a phenomenon that leads to the hypothesis of "plant vision".
- medicine: Awarded to a group from Switzerland, Germany and Belgium for demonstrating that dummy drugs that cause painful side effects are more effective in treatment than dummy drugs that do not cause pain.
- Physics: Awarded to Dr. James Leo of the University of Florida for extensive research investigating the swimming abilities of dead trout.
- probability: Awarded to a group of 50 researchers, mostly from the Netherlands, who conducted an experiment in which 350,757 coins were flipped to see if they tended to land on the side they started with, as predicted by Stanford's Percy Diaconis.
- chemistry: Awarded to a team from the Netherlands who used chromatography to separate drunken worms from sober ones as part of polymer science research.
- Biology: A prize was awarded posthumously to Fordyce Ely William Petersen for the study of factors affecting milk production in cows. The study involved placing a cat on the cow's back and blowing up paper bags to see if the flow of milk would change.
