Ig Nobel prizes 2024: The unexpected science that won this year

The Ig Nobel Prize is a satiric prize awarded annually since 1991

Anatomy: Roman Khonsari, for finding that there is a greater instance of scalp hair spiraling in a counter-clockwise direction in the Southern Hemisphere.
Biology: Fordyce Ely and William Petersen, for finding that placing a cat on the back of cows and repeatedly exploding paper bags every 10 seconds for two minutes led to them producing less milk.
Chemistry: Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn and Sander Woutersen, for their use of chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms as part of their research into polymer science.
Botany: Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding that the plant Boquila trifoliolata can mimic the leaves of plastic plants placed alongside it, leading them to conclude that “plant vision” is plausible.
Demography: Saul Newman, for finding that many claims regarding the existence of supercentenarians and other extreme age-related records originate from areas with short life spans, no birth certificates, and rampant clerical errors and pension fraud.
Medicine: Lieven Schenk, Tahmine Fadai and Christian Büchel, for finding that counterfeit medicine that induces painful side-effects can be more effective in patients than counterfeit medicine that does not cause painful side-effects.
Peace: B. F. Skinner, for his study on housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide them to their targets.
Physics: James Liao, for his long-running study on the ability of a dead trout to swim.
Physiology: Takanori Takebe, for finding that several mammals can breathe through their intestines using their anus.
Probability: A team of 50 researchers mostly based in the Netherlands, for supporting a prediction by Persi Diaconis that tossed coins are more likely to land the same way up as they started after they had flipped 350,757 coins.

lol

5 comments

The/In short from Wikipedia:
The Ig Nobel Prize is a satiric prize awarded annually since 1991
Anatomy: Roman Khonsari, for finding that there is a greater instance of scalp hair spiraling in a counter-clockwise direction in the Southern Hemisphere.
Biology: Fordyce Ely and William Petersen, for finding that placing a cat on the back of cows and repeatedly exploding paper bags every 10 seconds for two minutes led to them producing less milk.
Chemistry: Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn and Sander Woutersen, for their use of chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms as part of their research into polymer science.
Botany: Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding that the plant Boquila trifoliolata can mimic the leaves of plastic plants placed alongside it, leading them to conclude that “plant vision” is plausible.
Demography: Saul Newman, for finding that many claims regarding the existence of supercentenarians and other extreme age-related records originate from areas with short life spans, no birth certificates, and rampant clerical errors and pension fraud.
Medicine: Lieven Schenk, Tahmine Fadai and Christian Büchel, for finding that counterfeit medicine that induces painful side-effects can be more effective in patients than counterfeit medicine that does not cause painful side-effects.
Peace: B. F. Skinner, for his study on housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide them to their targets.
Physics: James Liao, for his long-running study on the ability of a dead trout to swim.
Physiology: Takanori Takebe, for finding that several mammals can breathe through their intestines using their anus.
Probability: A team of 50 researchers mostly based in the Netherlands, for supporting a prediction by Persi Diaconis that tossed coins are more likely to land the same way up as they started after they had flipped 350,757 coins.
lol
- Missile guidance in the Peace section - :yep:
Fuck New Sci, I went to go back to re-read part of the article to SWMBO and get "You have reached your article limit"
- Link to other sources are welcome.
  I searched for sources and picked this article as it's both relatively exhaustive, and one of the firsts ones published on this topic.
Here comes Saul Justin Newman: 'The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’
In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up. I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.