The prize honors unusual or seemingly bizarre research that “makes people laugh … and then think.” The award was created by Marc Abrahams and takes a humorous, sometimes satirical approach, but with serious goals: to promote public interest in science, make research more accessible, and highlight the relevance of even “strange” research. Marc Abrahams is the editor and co-founder of the Annals of Improbable Research and former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Irreproducible Results.
Nobel laureates regularly present the Ig Nobel Prize and the winners present their research, often in highly entertaining ways. This year the ceremony, which was held in person for the first time since the pandemic. The 34th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA. The prizes come with a cash award of 10 trillion dollars, though they are Zimbabwean dollars from a time of extreme inflation. The ceremony also includes the traditional paper airplane toss.
The Winners
BOTANY PRIZE
Jacob White, Magna, UT, USA, and Felipe Yamashita, University of Bonn, Germany, were awarded “for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants” [1].
The researchers placed an artificial vine model above several living plants and found that the plants attempted to mimic the artificial leaves. Mimic leaves had altered areas, perimeters, lengths, and widths, with higher aspect ratios and lower rectangularity and form factor compared to non-mimic leaves. They also observed that mimic leaves had less dense vascular networks, thinner vascular strands, and fewer free-ending veinlets.
ANATOMY PRIZE
Marjolaine Willems, Quentin Hennocq, Sara Tunon de Lara, Nicolas Kogane, Vincent Fleury, Romy Rayssiguier, Juan José Cortés Santander, Roberto Requena, Julien Stirnemann, and Roman Hossein Khonsari were awarded “for studying whether the hair on the heads of most people in the northern hemisphere swirls in the same direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise?) as hair on the heads of most people in the southern hemisphere” [2].
The team observed 74 same-sex Northern hemisphere twins investigating the genetic bases of whorl pattern formation. They also compared data on whorls from 25 children born in the Northern hemisphere (France) versus 25 children born in the Southern hemisphere (Chile).
They found that whorls rotated preferentially in the same direction in twins and counterclockwise whorls were more frequent in the Southern hemisphere. So they conclude that hair whorl formation is a genetically determined developmental process that can be influenced by extrinsic environmental factors.
MEDICINE PRIZE
Lieven A. Schenk, Tahmine Fadai, and Christian Büchel, University of Hamburg, Germany, were awarded “for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side-effects” [3].
In a study with 77 healthy participants, those who believed they received fentanyl nasal sprays (actually they contained capsaicin (mild burning sensation) or saline (inert)) were exposed to thermal pain. Participants were randomized: one group continued to believe in fentanyl, while the other was informed there was none.
The team found that nasal sprays inducing side effects led to lower pain levels compared to inert sprays. This effect depended on beliefs and expectations about side effects. Functional MRI data showed involvement of the descending pain modulatory system including the anterior cingulate cortex and the periaqueductal gray during pain after experiencing a nasal spray with side effects. These findings suggest that mild side effects can signal effective treatment and highlight a potential bias in clinical trials comparing treatments with side effects to placebos.
PHYSICS PRIZE
James C. Liao, Harvard University, was awarded “for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout” [4,5].
James C. Liao has found that a dead fish can move upstream using turbulence from a bluff cylinder, even if it’s not in the direct suction zone. Similarly, a special foil placed in the same turbulent wake can also move upstream by using the energy of the current.
This proves experimentally that, under proper conditions, a body can follow at a distance or even catch up to another upstream body without expending any energy of its own. This is useful for designing energy-efficient devices and studying fish movement in water.
CHEMISTRY PRIZE
Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, were awarded “for using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms” [6].
The convective transport rate of polymers through confined geometries depends on their size, allowing for size-based separation of polymer mixtures (chromatography). The team explored whether active polymers, such as living Tubifex tubifex worms, can be separated based on their activity by passing them through a channel filled with a hexagonal pillar array. They found that the transport rate through the channel varied with the worms’ activity levels. The team attributed this to different conformations sampled by more or less active worms. The study shows a novel method for sorting active polymers by their activity and offers a useful system for studying their hydrodynamics.
BIOLOGY PRIZE
Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen, University of Minnesota, USA, were awarded “for 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” [7].
Researchers investigated milk ejection in cows and found that it is indirectly controlled by the nervous system rather than directly. Sympathetic denervation and adrenalin injections did not cause milk ejection, but injections of the hormons pitocin or pitressin improved milk drainage. Pitocin was more effective than pitressin, suggesting pitressin’s effects were due to pitocin contamination.
The study indicates that milk ejection is a conditioned reflex regulated by a balance between naturally produced adrenalin and pitocin.
PEACE PRIZE
B. F. Skinner was awarded “for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles” [8].
DEMOGRAPHY PRIZE
Saul Justin Newman, University of Oxford, UK, was awarded “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” [9,10].
PROBABILITY PRIZE
František Bartoš, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Alexandra Sarafoglou, Henrik Godmann, and many colleagues were awarded “for showing, both in theory and by 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as it started” [11].
PHYSIOLOGY PRIZE
Ryo Okabe, Toyofumi F. Chen-Yoshikawa, Yosuke Yoneyama, Yuhei Yokoyama, Satona Tanaka, Akihiko Yoshizawa, Wendy L. Thompson, Gokul Kannan, Eiji Kobayashi, Hiroshi Date, and Takanori Takebe were awarded “for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus” [12].
References
[1] Jacob White, Felipe Yamashita, Boquila trifoliolata mimics leaves of an artificial plastic host plant, Plant Signaling & Behavior 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/15592324.2021.1977530
[2] Marjolaine Willems, Quentin Hennocq, Sara Tunon de Lara, Nicolas Kogane, Vincent Fleury, Romy Rayssiguier, Juan José Cortés Santander, Roberto Requena, Julien Stirnemann, Roman Hossein Khonsari, Genetic Determinism and Hemispheric Influence in Hair Whorl Formation, Journal of Stomatology, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery 2024, 125(2). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jormas.2023.101664
[3] Lieven A. Schenk, Tahmine Fadai, Christian Büchel, How Side Effects Can Improve Treatment Efficacy: A Randomized Trial, Brain 2024, 147(8), 2643–2651. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awae132
[4] James C. Liao, Neuromuscular Control of Trout Swimming in a Vortex Street: Implications for Energy Economy During the Kármán Gait, The Journal of Experimental Biology 2004, 207, 3495-3506. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.01125
[5] David N. Beal, Franz S. Hover, Michael S. Triantafyllou, James C. Liao, George V. Lauder, Passive Propulsion in Vortex Wakes, Journal of Fluid Mechanics 2006, 549, 385-402. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022112005007925
[6] Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen, Chromatographic Separation of Active Polymer–Like Worm Mixtures by Contour Length and Activity, Science Advances 2022, 8(23). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abj7918
[7] Fordyce Ely, William E. Petersen, Factors Involved in the Ejection of Milk, Journal of Dairy Science 1941, 3, 211- 23. https://doi.org/10.1093/ansci/1939.1.80
[8] B. F. Skinner, Pigeons in a Pelican, American Psychologist 1960, 15(1), 28-37. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045345
[9] Saul Justin Newman, Supercentenarians and the Oldest-Old Are Concentrated into Regions with No Birth Certificates and Short Lifespans, BioRxiv 2019. https://doi.org/10.1101/704080
[10] Saul Justin Newman, Supercentenarian and Remarkable Age Records Exhibit Patterns Indicative of Clerical Errors and Pension Fraud, BioRxiv 2024. https://doi.org/10.1101/704080
[11] František Bartoš, et al., Fair Coins Tend to Land on the Same Side They Started: Evidence from 350,757 Flips, arXiv 2023. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.04153
[12] Ryo Okabe, Toyofumi F. Chen-Yoshikawa, Yosuke Yoneyama, Yuhei Yokoyama, Satona Tanaka, Akihiko Yoshizawa, Wendy L. Thompson, Gokul Kannan, Eiji Kobayashi, Hiroshi Date, Takanori Takebe, Mammalian Enteral Ventilation Ameliorates Respiratory Failure, Med 2021, 2, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.medj.2021.04.004
- Webpage with the Winners
- Webcast of this Year’s Ceremony, YouTube September 12, 2024.
