Ten unexpected winners were announced today at the 34th Ig Nobel Prize Awards, all of them highly surprising and, in keeping with the prize’s long tradition, making people laugh and thinking.
The award ceremony took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the lecture hall was filled with paper airplanes thrown by audience members in honour of the Ig Nobel tradition of bringing in pieces of paper to be transformed into disposable aircraft.
Peaceful Dove
This year’s Ig Award winners cover a wide range of subjects, including humans, plants and other behaviours, including some birds.
Before deciding to use live pigeons to guide the flight path of a missile, you might want to conduct an experiment to see if it’s feasible to house a pigeon at the nose of a missile. Such an experiment was conducted in the 1940s by psychologist B.F. Skinner, who was posthumously awarded this year’s Ig Nobel Peace Prize.
Skinner’s daughter Julie attended the ceremony and accepted the award on his behalf. B.F. Skinner was a master of the field of behaviorism. A few years after his experiments with pigeons on missiles, he wrote: “Something happened in the short time of Project Pigeon that took a long time to be understood. The practical challenges confronting us led to new ways of thinking about the behavior of living things.”
A botanical sense of style
A similar rethinking of attitudes could come from the work of Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, two 2024 Ig Nobel Prize laureates in Botany. They found evidence that some real plants mimic the shapes of their artificial plastic neighbors. For more information, see their study,Bochyra trifoliata “Mimetic leaves of artificial plastic host plants”
Marjolaine Willems and her colleagues won the anatomy prize for investigating whether the hair of most people in the Northern Hemisphere curls in the same direction (clockwise or counterclockwise) as the hair of most people in the Southern Hemisphere.
The details are described in their paper, “Genetic determinism and hemispheric effects in hair whorl formation.”
The wind blows
Countless metaphors and phrases are associated with the research that earned Takanori Takebe and his colleagues the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, who discovered that many mammals can breathe through their anuses.
The persistence of Probability Prize winners František Bartos, Erik-Jan Wagenmakers, Aleksandra Sarafoglu, and Henrik Godman, along with about 50 colleagues (many of them students), paid off: together they demonstrated, both in theory and in 350,757 experiments, that when we toss a coin, it tends to land on the same side as the first time it is flipped.
Painful placebo
Lieven Schenk, Tahmin Fadai and Christian Büchel won the medicine prize for demonstrating that a placebo that causes painful side effects can be more effective than a placebo that does not cause painful side effects.
(Their work is reminiscent of, but not explicitly cited, a paper by Dan Ariely and colleagues that won the Medicine Prize in 2008 for demonstrating that expensive counterfeit drugs are more effective than cheap ones.)
Jimmy Liao won the Physics Prize for demonstrating and describing the swimming ability of dead trout. In a series of papers, he wrote about his discovery of this unexpected aspect of fluid dynamics.
Drunken Bug
Earthworms can become intoxicated when they consume alcohol, even when they are not drunk. Tess Heeremans, Antoine Debray, Daniel Bon, and Sander Woutersen were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry for devising a way to use chromatography to distinguish drunk from sober earthworms.
The research award for demography (the statistical study of population) went to Saul Justin Newman for his research exploring whether demographers notice important details: Newman found that many of the people famous for having lived the longest lived in places where birth and death records were poorly kept.
Newman wrote two papers on this, each with a title that neatly explains how his conclusions leap: “Supercentenarians and the oldest old are concentrated in areas with no birth certificates and short life expectancies,” and “Records of supercentenarians and noteworthy ages show patterns suggesting clerical errors and pension fraud.”
This year’s list of Ig winners ended with a flourish: Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen were posthumously awarded the Biology Prize for experiments they conducted in the 1940s, in which they exploded a paper bag next to a cat standing on a cow’s back to see when and how the cow would spill milk.
Eli’s daughter Jane and grandson Matt were also in attendance to accept the award and watch demonstrations including a toy cat, a man in a cow costume and five Nobel Prize winners making an exploding paper bag.
Marc Abrahams is the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founder of the journal Annals of Improbable Research. He previously worked on unusual uses of computers. His website is Impossible.
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