The Nobel Prize is the pinnacle of prestigious accolades, recognising groundbreaking achievements in science, literature and peace. But did you know there’s a playful counterpart to this esteemed accolade: the Ig Nobel Prize? Inspired by the Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobel Prizes highlight unconventional scientific discoveries, showcasing the quirkiest studies that deserve recognition. These awards are intended to celebrate the wild and wacky world of science, medicine and technology that is “so surprising that they make people laugh, then think." as per its website.
The Journal of Improbable Research announced this year’s 34th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize winners, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. After being held online for 3 years, it was held in person this year and also live-streamed on YouTube.
Among the highlights of this year’s winners was the Physiology prize presented to a team of US and Japanese researchers, led by Ryo Okabe and Takanori Takebe, for their astonishing discovery that many mammals are capable of breathing through their butts.
If you found this amusing, then the other quirky awards from the ceremony will surely leave you in splits.
The Botany Prize recognised Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita who found “evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighbouring artificial plastic plants." The Chemistry Prize went to Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn and Sander Woutersen for using chromatography, a process for separating components of a mixture to separate drunk and sober worms.
The Anatomy Prize was won by a team of scientists from France and Chile who explored “whether the hair on the heads of most people in the northern hemisphere swirls in the same direction as the hair on the heads of most people in the southern hemisphere."
This year’s Physics Prize was bagged by James Liao for his quirky study on how a dead trout swims, while the Medicine Prize went to Lieven A. Schenk, Tahmine Fadai, and Christian Büchel. Their study revealed that fake medicines causing side effects sometimes can be more effective than those without.
The ceremony also honoured late BF Skinner posthumously with this year’s Peace Prize for his 1960 study into whether live pigeons could be housed inside missiles to guide their flight paths.
It seems even coins have a favourite side too. Well, University of Amsterdam researcher Frantisek Bartos and his team studied the results of 350, 757 coin flips. They discovered that coins are slightly more likely to land on the same side they started from. Obviously, this groundbreaking finding earned them the Probability Prize.
Saul Justin Newman was awarded the Demography Prize for his research revealing that “many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death record-keeping." And the final award, the Biology Prize, was given to Fordyce Ely and William E Petersen for their 1941 study where they tested how and when cows spew their milk by exploding a paper bag next to a cat standing on their back.
While the Ig Nobel Prize is not officially affiliated with the Nobel Prize, the awards are presented by actual Nobel laureates. The First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony took place in 1991 at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Winners walked away with quirky gag prizes, including an outdated Zimbabwean 10 trillion-dollar bill and a playful “transparent box" full of items related to “Murphy’s Law."
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