Breathing through the anus, painful placebos, worm racing… the craziest research rewarded by the anti-Nobel 2024

The “Ig Nobel” for peace was awarded to the late American psychologist B.F. Skinner for placing trained pigeons in the noses of missiles to guide them during World War II. SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP

Mice can breathe through their anuses, pigeons guide missiles and placebos are more effective if they are painful: here are some examples of the “research” rewarded by the 2024 anti-Nobels.

This competition, called Ig-Nobel – a play on words for “ignoble” in English- rewards “achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think”.

Here are the ten winners of the 34th edition, which was held on Thursday night in the United States, one month before the real Nobel Prizes.

New Breathing

The Physiology Prize went to a Japanese-American team that discovered that many mammals could breathe through their anus.

It was already known that loaches, a species of fish, were capable of “intestinal respiration”. Researchers have shown that this is also the case in mice, pigs, and rats, suggesting that the intestine may be used as a “accessory respiratory organ”.

Missile-Guiding Pigeons

The “Ig Nobel Peace Prize” was awarded to the late American psychologist B.F. Skinner for placing trained pigeons in the noses of missiles to guide them during World War II. The “pigeon project” was abandoned in 1944 despite an apparently successful test on a target in New Jersey (eastern United States).

Plants dream of being plastic

The botany prize was awarded for research showing that some plants mimic the shape of nearby plastic plants.

The researchers' hypothesis is that the Boquila, a South American vine, “has a kind of eye that can see”.“How do they do it? We have no idea!”, Felipe Yamashita of the University of Bonn in Germany said, to laughter from the audience.

Heads or Tails

Researchers have won the probability prize for tossing coins into the air 350,757 times. Inspired by a magician, they showed that the side facing up before the toss wins about 50.8% of the time. After 81 days of flipping parts, the team had to use massage guns to ease their aching shoulders.

The Secret to Longevity

The Demographics Prize honored a study showing that many people famous for their longevity live in places with "poor quality" birth and death records.

The real secret to longevity is "move to a place where birth certificates are rare, teach your children pension fraud and start lying", said its Australian laureate, Saul Justin Newman.

Worm race

The chemistry prize went to a team that used a complex technique called chromatography to separate drunken and sober worms. The researchers demonstrated on the Ig Nobel stage by re-enacting a race between a sober worm, dyed red, and a drunken worm, dyed blue. The sober worm has won.

Capillary vortices

The Franco-Chilean team that won the anatomy prize was interested in the swirls formed by the hair growing on the top of the head. In most people, it grows in a clockwise direction, they discovered. In the southern hemisphere, however, vortices in the opposite direction are more common.

Painful placebos

The medicine prize went to a European team that showed that placebos – treatments without an active ingredient used in medical studies to compare the effectiveness of a real treatment – were more effective if they caused painful side effects.

The swimming of the dead fish

The physics prize went to James Liao for having "demonstrated and explained the abilities of swimming of a dead trout". "I discovered that a living fish moves more than a dead fish", he said.

Frightened cat

The biology prize was awarded to Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen for a particularly strange experiment conducted in 1941 in the United States. The two scientists, now deceased, had burst a sac next to a cat perched on the back of a cow to “explore how and when” the latter “expelled their milk”.