Each year, in the run-up to the Nobel season, scientists put aside their thinking caps for this particular event and don sillier ones. And this year was no different.
This year’s Ig Nobel ceremony was held on September 12 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with the awards presented by actual Nobel Prize laureates. The theme was “Murphy’s Law”—if anything can go wrong, it will.
The winning research spanned a truly bizarre gamut—from copycat plants and swimming dead fish to drunk worms and cows scared into producing more milk.
The satiric prize has been awarded to 10 researchers each year since 1991 by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”
“The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology,” says the magazine .
Does the hemisphere affect direction of hair growth?
The Chemistry Prize was awarded for a quirky experiment on “using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.” The University of Amsterdam researchers used living Tubifex tubifex worms as models for polymers, separating worms exposed to ethanol (which became sluggish) from their more active, sober counterparts.
In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek move, the Peace Prize was posthumously given to famed psychologist B.F. Skinner for his bizarre experiments exploring whether live pigeons could be housed inside missiles to guide their flight paths.
The Anatomy Prize was awarded for research on “Genetic Determinism and Hemispheric Influence in Hair Whorl Formation,” which explored whether the hemisphere one is born in affects the direction—clockwise or counterclockwise—of one’s hair whorls.
The Botany Prize went to a team that discovered “some real plants mimic the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants,” while the Demography Prize was given for research uncovering that many famous long-lived individuals hailed from regions with poor birth-and-death recordkeeping.
Physics of dead fish swimming
University of Florida biologist James C. Liao received the Ig Nobel Physics Prize for his intriguing work on “demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.” Liao’s research describes how the natural flexibility of a trout’s body allows it to produce passive thrust, causing it to sometimes surge upstream even after death.
The Physiology Prize was awarded to a team from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, for discovering that “many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus,” as noted in the Ig Nobel citation .
Finally, Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen posthumously received the Biology Prize for an unusual experiment that involved “exploding a paper bag next to a cat standing on a cow ,” in an effort to determine how and when cows eject their milk.
The Ig Nobel Prize
Founded in 1991, the Ig Nobel Prizes are a playful spoof of the prestigious Nobel Prizes, celebrating quirky and unconventional research, as well as serving as a periodic reminder of why “science shouldn’t take itself too seriously” .
The lighthearted awards ceremony includes miniature operas, live scientific demonstrations, and 24/7 lectures, where researchers must summarize their work twice—first in 24 seconds and then in just seven words.
Acceptance speeches are capped at 60 seconds, adding to the fun atmosphere. Despite the seemingly absurd nature of the honored studies, they often have real scientific value, aligning with the event’s motto. The audience joins in the festivities by making and tossing paper airplanes throughout the ceremony.
“While some politicians were trying to make sensible things sound crazy, scientists discovered some crazy-sounding things that make a lot of sense,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, told Fortune .
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