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Thursday, 10 October, 2024
HomeOn A Lighter NoteButt-breathing, drunk worms and hair whorls ... 2024's Ig Nobel winning studies

Butt-breathing, drunk worms and hair whorls … 2024's Ig Nobel winning studies

The recent highly-anticipated Ig Nobel awards ceremony included the winner of this year’s Prize for Physiology, who found that all mammals can breathe through their backsides – making researchers wonder if humans with breathing problems might benefit from a blast of oxygen up the butt.

Experiments on mice, pigs and rats suggest that guts could be repurposed as an “accessory breathing organ”. The experiment apparently started during the Covid-19 pandemic and the findings indicate this “potentially provides an adjunctive means of oxygenation for patients under respiratory distress conditions”.

IOL reports that the Ig Nobel prizes, which push the boundaries of common sense and believability, are awarded annually in mid-September (before the stuffy Nobel Prize ceremony) for 10 achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think”.

The awards were presented at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which has produced almost 100 Nobel Laureates.

The event features “24/7” lectures in which recipients first explain their subject in 24 seconds, then in seven words.

The Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to BF Skinner from the US for experiments on the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide them to their targets.

The Ig Nobel Prize for Biology was awarded posthumously to scientists for their 1940 investigation in which they exploded a paper bag next to a cat that was standing on the back of a cow, to “explore how and when cows spew their milk”. By repeatedly exploding paper bags every 10 seconds for two minutes they discovered that a frightened cow releases less milk.

For men going bald, you probably don’t want to know that the anatomy prize went to Professor Roman Khonsari, a craniofacial surgeon and his team of French and Chilean scientists. They discovered that the hair whorls of most people swirl clockwise ‒ however, in the southern hemisphere, counter-clockwise whorls are more common.

And the Ig Nobel for Medicine went to European researchers who demonstrated that fake medicine that causes painful side effects can work better than fake medicine that does not.

The Ig Nobel Prize for Physics went to James Liao, who inspired a wave of inspiration with his groundbreaking discovery for “demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout”.

“I discovered that a live fish moves more than a dead fish,” Liao said as he accepted the prize.

The chemistry award went to a team in Amsterdam who used a complex analysis called chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms. The researchers demonstrated the study by re-enacting a race on stage between a sober worm that had been dyed red, and a blue worm they got drunk. The sober worm won.

This year’s prize for probability went to a team of 50 mostly Dutch researchers. They flipped 350 757 coins to test a hypothesis put forward by a former magician and professor of statistics at Stanford University, Persi Diaconis. Their rigorous “peer review system and sore muscles supported his prediction that tossed coins are (slightly) more likely to land the same way up as they started”.

The botany prize was awarded for the discovery that some real plants imitate the shapes of nearby plastic plants. A prize-winner said their hypothesis is that the Boquila plant they studied “has some sort of eye that can see”.

And for those who want to live a long and happy life, the demography prize was awarded for detective work which found that many of the people famous for living the longest happened to live in places with “lousy birth-and-death record-keeping”.

Australian researcher Saul Justin Newman read out a poem at the ceremony which concluded that the real way to longevity is to “move where birth certificates are rare, teach your kids pension fraud and start lying”.

The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony is the brainchild of Marc Abrahams who also co-founded a magazine called Annals of Improbable Research.

The only person to have won a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize is Sir Andre Geim. The Ig Nobel Prize awarded in 2000 was for levitating a frog by magnetism. In 2010, he received the Nobel Prize in physics for his work with the electromagnetic properties of graphene.

 

IOL article – Bum-breathing mammals, dead fish swimming, among 2024 Ig Nobel winners (Open access)

 

See more from MedicalBrief archives:

 

2019 Ig Nobels: Training surgeons like dogs

 

Kidney stone removal roller-coaster wins Ig Nobel for Medicine

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