2024 Ig Nobel Prizes for Silly Science Include Pigeons in Missiles, Hair Whorls, and Dead Fish That Swim

Whatever tin spell wrong, volition spell wrong. That’s Murphy’s Law. It was besides the taxable of the 34th Ig Nobel Prizes, the yearly ceremonial which awards each kinds of wacky probe from crossed the technological fields. Needless to accidental the ceremonial was a implicit success.

This year’s 10 prizes were produced by the Annals of Improbable Research mag and awarded by existent Nobel laureates. If you’re looking for those awards, the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prizes will beryllium announced Monday, October 7 done Friday, October 11. But if you privation to larn astir immoderate genuinely engrossing research, support reading.

Kees Moeliker, the 2005 Ig Nobel laureate successful biology for his enactment connected homosexual necrophilia successful the mallard duck (Moeliker proceeded to procure a dormant mallard duck from a container earlier the anxious audience), gave the obligatory information code astatine the opening of the awards.

Before you get immoderate comic ideas: this probe is serious. It whitethorn beryllium the recipient of a not-so-Nobel award, presented successful a silly way, but the probe that each idiosyncratic was being recognized for was done with each the sincerity and steadfast rigor that comprises immoderate worthwhile research.

Here are immoderate standouts from this year’s prizes: The botany prize was awarded to a squad that recovered immoderate plants that turn alongside integrative plants mimic the shapes of those integrative plants; the anatomy prize was awarded to a French-Chilean squad for “studying whether the hairsbreadth connected the heads of astir radical successful the bluish hemisphere swirls successful the aforesaid absorption arsenic hairsbreadth connected the heads of astir radical successful the confederate hemisphere.” The physics prize went to a researcher whose work, published successful the Journal of Experimental Biology, described the swimming abilities of a dormant trout. Again, these works are existent probe papers, the afloat database of which tin beryllium recovered here.

The prize successful demography (a idiosyncratic favorite) went to an Australian squad that recovered supercentenarians and different radical with singular property records thin to beryllium calved successful places with nary commencement certificates and abbreviated beingness spans. Makes you think!

Last year’s winners featured a squad that discovered however expecting a boring lecture could induce boredom successful the audience. Another squad studied wherefore radical halt and look up erstwhile they spot others doing the same. A 3rd squad counted chemoreceptor hairs successful cadavers to cheque if some nostrils had the aforesaid number.

The implicit database of past year’s winners tin beryllium recovered here.

Last but not least—in fact, it was the archetypal prize awarded past night—the Ig Nobel Peace Prize was posthumously awarded to B.F. Skinner for “experiments to spot the feasibility of lodging unrecorded pigeons wrong missiles to usher the formation paths.” The grant was accepted by Skinner’s daughter, Julie Skinner-Vargas.

Skinner’s insubstantial connected the substance opened with “This is the past of a crackpot idea, calved connected the incorrect broadside of the tracks intellectually speaking, but yet vindicated successful a benignant of mediate people respectability.” If that doesn’t sum-up the Ig Nobel prizes themselves I don’t cognize what will.