2024 Ig Nobel Prizes

2024 Ig Nobel Prizes

Scientists who studied inebriated worms, a dead trout’s swimming acumen, and pigeons as potential missile pilots were among those who garnered awards at the 34th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. The humorous honors, which are given for “achievements that first make people LAUGH, and then THINK,” were presented during an event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Sept. 12. The satirical magazine Annals of Improbable Research produced the event in collaboration with MIT Press. The publication’s editor, Marc Abrahams, a legend in laughter, served as master of ceremonies.

Researchers led by Roman Hossein Khonsari of Paris Cité University took home the Anatomy Prize for the paper “Genetic Determinism and Hemispheric Influence in Hair Whorl Formation,” in which they attempted to determine whether the hemisphere one was born in has any impact on the direction—clockwise or counterclockwise—of one’s hair whorls (J. Stomatol. Oral Maxillofac. Surg. 2023, DOI: 10.1016/j.jormas.2023.101664).

Based on work reported in 1939, Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen posthumously won the Biology Prize for, as the Ig Nobel citation puts it, “exploding a paper bag next to a cat that’s standing on the back of a cow, to explore how and when cows spew their milk” (J. Anim. Sci., DOI: 10.1093/ansci/1939.1.80).

The University of Bonn’s Felipe Yamashita and independent researcher Jacob White claimed the Botany Prize “for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants” (Plant Signaling Behav. 2021, DOI: 10.1080/15592324.2021.1977530).

The coveted Chemistry Prize went to Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen for “using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.” The University of Amsterdam researchers used living Tubifex tubifex worms as a model system for polymers in a chromatography experiment. They separated sluggish worms that had been exposed to an ethanol solution from more active sober worms (Sci. Adv. 2022, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abj7918).

The Demography Prize went to Saul Justin Newman of the University of Oxford “for detective work to discover that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping” (BioRxiv 2024, DOI: 10.1101/704080).

University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf researchers led by Lieven A. Schenk nabbed the Medicine Prize for an experiment that involved a nasal spray containing the peppery compound capsaicin. Their work showed “that fake medicine that causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side-effects” (Brain 2024, DOI: 10.1093/brain/awae132).

Famed psychologist B. F. Skinner was posthumously—and somewhat sarcastically—awarded the Peace Prize “for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles” (Am. Psychol. 1960, DOI: 10.1037/h0045345).

University of Florida biologist James C. Liao won the Physics Prize “for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.” The Ig Nobel committee cited several of Liao’s papers, but perhaps his 2022 Current Biology article put it best: “In a remarkable example of passive thrust production, the natural flexibility of a trout corpse causes it to frequently surge upstream,” he writes (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.04.073).

The Physiology Prize went to a team led by Takanori Takebe, a doctor and scientist at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, who discovered, according to the Ig Nobel citation, “that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus” (Med 2021, DOI: 10.1016/j.medj.2021.04.004). Regular readers of Newscripts will be familiar with this work on rear-end respiration.

And for their landmark study “Fair Coins Tend to Land on the Same Side They Started: Evidence from 350,757 Flips,” the University of Amsterdam’s František Bartoš and 49 colleagues garnered the Probability Prize (arXiv 2023, DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2310.04153).

A recording of the Ig Nobel ceremony will be available at youtube.com/improbableresearch. National Public Radio’s Science Friday will air an edited recording of it Nov. 29, the day after US Thanksgiving.

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