Dead fish swimming and rectal breathing on the menu of improbable science Nobel Prize winners

As a burlesque preamble to the serious Nobel Prize season, scheduled for early October, the Ig Nobel ceremony (a play on words with the adjective “ignoble”), a grand mass of improbable science, was held on Thursday, September 12 in Cambridge (Massachusetts). While, due to the pandemic and post-pandemic, the last four editions had been held by videoconference, the event once again took place in a real room with a real audience who revived the tradition of sending a shower of paper airplanes onto the stage.

Because, to celebrate improbable science, which answers the craziest questions, we don’t take ourselves too seriously. So it was in all relaxation that real Nobel laureates, like Esther Duflo, came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to present the prizes in ten categories that fluctuate from one year to the next at the whim of the master of ceremonies, the American Marc Abrahams.

At the Ig Nobel, humor and irony are de rigueur. This is how we should understand the Ig Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the American project that, during the Second World War, studied the possibility of placing pigeons in missiles to ensure their guidance system. To stay with animal experiments that would no longer be acceptable today, let us also mention the biology category, with a 1941 study focusing on the mechanism of ejection of milk by the cow, especially when it is frightened: to achieve this, paper bags were exploded near the head of a cat… placed on the back of said cow.

Another animal example in physics, with an article revealing that a dead trout swims very well in a swirling environment. Finally, in physiology, a Japanese team was distinguished after showing that, like the fish called “loach”, mammals (mice and pigs) could oxygenate themselves rectally. Next step, humans. Volunteers?

Random boost

The Ig Nobels usually reserve a special place for work on the body. In the anatomy category, a study conducted by the French was thus rewarded, which asked whether the spirals that draw the implantation of hair turn in a different direction depending on whether one lives in the Northern or Southern hemisphere. In medicine, the Ig Nobel went to this article proving that a placebo that hurts is more effective than a placebo that is painless.

It would take more space to detail the sometimes hilarious protocols of these experiments. Let us note all the same that, in the probability category, it was demonstrated, after having played heads or tails 350,757 times, that there was a slight bias: 51% (and not 50%) of the time, the coin lands on the side on which it was thrown. Proof that we can give a helping hand to chance in this game.

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