The 34th Ig Nobel Prize was awarded today for 10 unexpected things – all so surprising that, in keeping with the Prize's long tradition, it makes people laugh and makes them think.
of Award Ceremony The event took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the lecture hall was filled with paper airplanes thrown by audience members honoring the Ig Nobel tradition of bringing in pieces of paper to be transformed into disposable aircraft.
Peaceful Dove
This year's Ig Award winners cover a wide range of subjects, including humans, plants and other behaviours, including some birds.
Before deciding to use live pigeons to guide the flight path of a missile, you might want to conduct an experiment to see if it's feasible to house a pigeon at the nose of a missile. Such an experiment was conducted in the 1940s by psychologist B.F. Skinner, who was posthumously awarded this year's Ig Nobel Peace Prize.
Skinner's daughter Julie attended the ceremony and accepted the award on his behalf. B.F. Skinner was a giant in the field of behaviorism. A few years after his experiment with putting pigeons on missiles, he Written“Something happened in the short time frame of the Pigeon project that took a long time to be understood. The practical challenges before us have led to new ways of thinking about organismic behavior.”
A botanical sense of style
A similar rethinking of attitudes could come from the work of Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, two 2024 Ig Nobel Prize laureates in Botany. They found evidence that some real plants mimic the shapes of their artificial plastic neighbors. For more information, see their study,Bochyra trifoliata Mimicking the leaves of an artificial plastic host plant“
Marjolaine Willems and her colleagues won the anatomy prize for investigating whether the hair of most people in the Northern Hemisphere curls in the same direction (clockwise or counterclockwise) as the hair of most people in the Southern Hemisphere.
For details, see their paper “Genetic determinism and hemispheric influence in hair formation“
The wind blows
Countless metaphors and phrases are associated with the work that earned Takebe Takanori and his colleagues the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Found Many mammals can breathe through their anus.
The tenacity of the Probability Prize winners František Bartos, Erik Jan Wagenmakers, Aleksandra Sarafoglu and Henrik Godman, along with around 50 colleagues, many of them students, has paid off. ShowedWe know, both in theory and from 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as you started with.
Painful placebo
Lieven Schenk, Tahmin Fadai and Christian Büchel won the medicine prize for demonstrating that a placebo that causes painful side effects can be more effective than a placebo that does not cause painful side effects.
(Their study It reminds me of the prize-winning paper by Dan Ariely and his colleagues, but doesn't explicitly cite it. 2008 Medicine Award They demonstrated that expensive counterfeit medicines are more effective than cheaper counterfeit medicines.
Jimmy Liao won the Physics Prize for demonstrating and describing the swimming ability of dead trout. series of paper He writes about his discovery of this unexpected aspect of fluid mechanics.
Drunken Bug
Earthworms can stay drunk and can become drunk when they consume alcohol. Tess Heremans, Antoine Debray, Daniel Bon and Sander Woutersen method Chromatography is used to separate drunk and non-drunk bugs.
The research award for demography (the statistical study of population) went to Saul Justin Newman for his research exploring whether demographers notice important details: Newman found that many of the people famous for having lived the longest lived in places where birth and death records were poorly kept.
Newman wrote two papers on the subject, each with a title that succinctly explained how his conclusions leaped.The oldest old and the oldest old are concentrated in areas without birth certificates and where life expectancy is shortThe other one is “Records of super-longevity and noteworthy ages show patterns that suggest clerical errors and pension fraud“
This year's gathering of Ig laureates ended with a flourish: Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen were posthumously awarded the biology prize. experiment That's just what they did in the 1940s: They exploded a paper bag next to a cat standing on a cow's back to see when and how the cow would spill milk.
Eli's daughter Jane and grandson Matt were also in attendance to accept the award and watch demonstrations including a toy cat, a man in a cow costume and five Nobel Prize winners making an exploding paper bag.
Marc Abrahams is the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founder of the journal Annals of Improbable Research. He previously worked on unusual uses of computers. His website is Impossible.
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