September 14, 2024, 7:01 PM
September 14, 2024, 7:01 PM
The Mice can breathe through their anus, Pigeons guide missiles and sober worms beat drunks: these are some examples of the “research” awarded by the anti-Nobel 2024.
This competition, called Ig-Nobel – a pun on the English word “ignoble” – rewards “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”
These are the ten winners of the 34th edition, which was held from Thursday to Friday in the United States, a month before the real Nobel Prizes.
– New way of breathing –
The Physiology Prize was awarded to a Japanese-American team that discovered that many mammals can breathe through their anus.
It was already known that loaches, a species of fish, were capable of “gut respiration.” Researchers showed that this is also the case for mice, pigs and rats, suggesting that the gut could be used as an “accessory respiratory organ.”
– Missile Guide Pigeons –
The “Ig Nobel” Peace Prize was awarded to the late American psychologist BF Skinner for placing trained pigeons on the tips of missiles to guide them during World War II.
Project Dove was abandoned in 1944 despite apparent success in a test on a target in New Jersey (eastern United States).
– Plants dream of being made of plastic –
The Botany Prize was awarded for research that showed some plants mimic the shape of nearby plastic plants.
The researchers’ hypothesis is that the Boquila, a South American vine, “has a kind of eye that can see.”
“How do they do it? We have no idea!” said Felipe Yamashita of the University of Bonn in Germany, to laughter from the audience.
Researchers won the Probability Prize for flipping a coin 350,757 times.
Inspired by a magician, they showed that the side facing up before the coin is tossed wins in about 50.8% of cases.
After 81 days of coin tossing, the team had to use massage equipment to relieve their sore shoulders.
– The secret of longevity –
The Demographics Prize was awarded for a study that showed that many people known for their longevity live in places with “mediocre” birth and death records.
The real secret to longevity is to “move to a place where birth certificates are rare, teach your kids how to cheat the pension system and start lying,” quipped Australian award-winning Saul Justin Newman.
The Chemistry prize was awarded to a team that used a complex technique called chromatography to separate drunk worms from sober worms.
The researchers demonstrated on the Ig-Nobel stage by recreating a race between a sober worm, dyed red, and a drunken, blue worm.
The French-Chilean team that won the Anatomy Prize was interested in the whorls that hair forms on the top of the head. They found that in most people, they grow clockwise. However, in the southern hemisphere, whorls in the opposite direction are more common.
The Medicine Prize was awarded to a European team that demonstrated that placebos (treatments without active ingredients used in medical studies to compare the effectiveness of a real treatment) were more effective if they caused painful side effects.
– The Dead Fish Swim –
The Physics Prize was awarded to James Liao for “demonstrating and explaining the swimming capabilities of a dead trout.”
“I found that a live fish moved more than a dead fish,” he said.
The Biology Prize was awarded to Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen for a particularly strange experiment conducted in the United States in 1941.
The two scientists, now deceased, scared a cat sitting on top of a cow by bursting a paper bag. The aim was to “explore how and when” the cow “expelled its milk.”
