When Science Makes You Laugh: The Absurd Winners of the 2024 IgNobel Prize

From mammals breathing through their anuses to pigeons guiding missiles, passing through the sense of style of plants, drunken worms and hair movements in the two hemispheres. These are some of the researches that have earned IgNobels, the awards for science that ‘first makes you laugh and then think’which has reached its 34th edition. The awards ceremony took place at Massachusetts Institute of Technologyin a room full of paper airplanes launched by the audience, as per the IgNobel tradition of recycling paper by transforming it into disposable airplanes.

This year’s winning research spans a wide range of human, botanical and even avian behaviors, New Scientist reports. Among them are: pigeons driving bombs. The IgNobel Peace Prize went to psychologist Burrhus. F. Skinner, for experiments conducted in the 1940s on the feasibility of housing pigeons inside a missile, exploiting their ability to recognize a target, to guide its flight trajectories. The award for ‘Project Pigeon’ was collected by Skinner’s daughter, Julie, who attended the ceremony. The award for botany was the sense of style of plants: In a study on ‘Boquila trifoliolata’, Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita demonstrated that some real plants mimic the shapes of nearby plants, even if they are made of plastic, using a kind of botanical vision system present on their leaves.

Marjolaine Willems and colleagues have withdrawn the‘IgNobel Prize for Anatomyfor having studied “if the hairs on the heads of most people in the Northern Hemisphere spin in the same direction (clockwise or counterclockwise) of the hair on the head of most people in the Southern Hemisphere.” Researchers Lieven Schenk, Tahmine Fadai and Christian Büchel won the medicine prize with a study on side effects, showing that counterfeit drugs that cause painful side effects can be more effective than counterfeit drugs that do not.

The IgNobel Prize for Physiology was awarded to the discovery that mammals can breathe through their anus. The study was conducted during the Covid pandemic by Japanese researchers, who wanted to see if humans with respiratory distress could benefit from enteral ventilation, with the rectal administration of oxygen, after noticing that some animals can use their intestines to breathe. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, the scientists found that the animals absorbed oxygen supplied through the rectum, and their work is the basis of a clinical trial to see if this procedure could treat respiratory distress.

University of Florida researcher Jimmy Liao received the prize for physics for having demonstrated and explained the swimming ability of a dead trout. In a series of articles he described the discovery of this unexpected aspect of fluid dynamics. And again, How to distinguish drunk worms from sober ones? This question was answered by the Dutch Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn and Sander Woutersen, who won the‘IgNobel Prize for Chemistry for devising a method using chromatography to separate drunk worms from sober ones.

The IgNobel Prize for Demography went to Saul Justin Newman for his investigative work on super centenarians. The researcher discovered that many of the people famous for having exceeded the century of life, in reality lived in places where the birth and death records were terrible. Not only that. They were also regions with short life expectancies. The longevity records would therefore, according to his conclusions, be the result of material errors and even pension fraud. Finally, the prize for Biology The prize was awarded to an experiment conducted in the 1940s, which consisted of exploding a paper bag next to a cat riding on the back of a cow, to explore how and when cows make milk.