The IG Nobel Prize ceremony celebrated unusual scientific achievements, aiming to “make people laugh, then think.” Winners included a Japanese research team that discovered mammals can breathe through their anuses, potentially offering an alternative way to provide oxygen to critically ill patients. The team’s findings could have been life-saving during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Other prize winners demonstrated that fake medicine with side effects can be more effective than fake medicine without side effects, some plants mimic fake plastic leaves, and real plants imitate their neighbors’ shapes. The ceremony also featured live demonstrations of experiments, including one where a cat stood on a cow’s back to explore the reasons for cows spewing milk.
Prize winners included American psychologist B.F. Skinner, who was posthumously awarded the peace prize for his work using pigeons to guide missile flight paths. Another winner demonstrated that a coin tends to land on the same side it started when flipped, requiring 350,757 experiments to prove.
The ceremony’s quirky atmosphere included an accordion performance and paper airplane tosses, with audience members attempting to throw their creations safely at a target on stage. The winners received obsolete Zimbabwean ten-trillion-dollar bills and a “transparent box” containing items related to Murphy’s Law – the theme of this year’s ceremony and the principle that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/science/ig-nobel-prize-ceremony-2024-intl-scli/index.html