Ten new Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded to scientists for their often outlandish but always thought-provoking research. Here are our favorites!
The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony is never a boring event! This 34e The awards ceremony was interspersed with entertaining segments such as paper airplane throwing and a mini opera competition on the theme of Murphy’s Law, where all the candidates were declared losers.
The highlight of the evening, however, remains the award-winning scientists and their research “which makes you smile and then think.”
Peace Prize: Pigeons and Missiles
Can we trust the trajectory of missiles to pigeons placed inside them? The idea, absurd as it may seem, was seriously studied in the 1940s. It had been proposed by an American psychologist for a research program during the Second World War. Unsurprisingly, the idea was not taken up. The psychologist in question, BF Skinner, who detailed the approach in a paper published in 1960, was nevertheless awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize posthumously.
Botany Prize: Real or Fake Plant?
There Boquila trifoliolataa plant from South America, can mimic the appearance of the leaves of an artificial plant placed nearby. This phenomenon has intrigued scientists, who have wondered how the plant can “see” and reproduce the shape and texture of an artificial plant. And what use could it possibly be? Stay tuned!
Anatomy Prize: The Direction of Hair Rotation
A group of French and Chilean scientists wanted to check whether the hair of people in the Northern Hemisphere curls in the same direction as those living in the Southern Hemisphere. In short, does our geographical location influence the direction, clockwise or counterclockwise, in which our hair curls?
According to their observations, hair seems to curl more often in a counterclockwise direction in the southern hemisphere. One of the researchers humorously acknowledged that his study lacks relevance, but that he was “convinced that deciphering shapes in nature can help us discover fundamental mechanisms.”
Physiology Prize: Breathing… through the backside?
Japanese and American scientists have made a surprising discovery: some mammals can “breathe through the rectum.” Yes, you read that right! However, this is not breathing like the one that takes place in the lungs, but simply absorbing oxygen.
Their experiment, conducted on rodents and pigs, showed that these animals can absorb oxygen in liquid form (this liquid is usually used for artificial pulmonary respiration). It should be noted here that breathing cannot be done only through this! But it could be useful in the context of intensive care, in the event of a serious pulmonary disease such as COVID-19.
In fact, while the vast majority of mammalian cells obtain their oxygen from the blood, which is itself oxygenated in the lungs, a few cells can receive part of their oxygen by passive diffusion. Among these cells are those located in the external region of the skin and those located in the cornea.
Probability prize: heads or tails?
These European scientists certainly had a lot of patience: they carried out 350,757 coin tosses to show that coins tend to land on the same side as their starting position. For this study, 48 people, most of them students, tossed coins from 44 different currencies.
Chemistry Prize: Drunken Verses
It’s unclear what prompted a team of Dutch and French scientists to investigate the matter. They used chromatography, a technique usually used to separate the chemical components of a mixture, to separate live worms (Tubifex tubifex). These worms served as polymer models, and were more or less active. The cause? Some were drunk (soaked in ethanol) and others were not! It is hardly surprising that the drunk worms had much more difficulty migrating than the other worms.
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