Drunken Worms and Anal Breathing: The 2024 Ig Nobel Prize Results

The 34th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, which honors research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think deeply, was held at Harvard, Liter.kz reports, citing the official site awards.

“The Peace Prize was awarded posthumously to American psychologist Burrhus Skinner for his unusual idea of ​​using pigeons as missile guides. In the 1940s, he developed special equipment to train birds to peck at targets on a screen. Despite its achievements, the project was closed in the United States. The Demography Prize was awarded to Dr. Saul Newman from Oxford University. He found that many long-lived people became so due to bureaucratic errors related to improper registration of birth and death certificates,” the source writes.

French doctors have won the anatomy prize for their research, which showed that the direction of hair curls depends on the hemisphere of the Earth: in the Southern Hemisphere, hair curls clockwise, while in northerners it is the opposite.

The physics prize was awarded to scientists for proving that a dead trout can swim against a current if there is a cylindrical obstacle behind the current that creates a vortex street.

“A team from Amsterdam won the chemistry prize for developing a method for separating drunken worms from sober ones. In medicine, the prize went to scientists who discovered that placebos with side effects are more effective than placebos without side effects. The botany prize went to Jacob White from the US and Felipe Yamashite from Germany for proving that some plants can imitate the shape of the leaves of artificial plants next to them,” the achievements are listed.

In the field of probability theory, the prize was awarded to scientists who proved that a tossed coin more often lands on the same side as it was initially on. The experiment involved tossing the coin almost 351 thousand times.

The Physiology Prize was awarded to Japanese researchers who found that pigs and rodents can breathe through their anuses. This discovery, made in 2021, could help amid a shortage of ventilators.