The year’s weirdest research is revealed in the ‘Ig Nobel’ awards parody – from research into training pigeons to pilot bombs to an experiment on the direction our hair spins
Peace Prize
BF Skinner for experiments to investigate the feasibility of housing live pigeons in rockets to determine the flight paths of the rockets.
Botany Prize
Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of nearby artificial plastic plants.
Anatomy Prize
Marjolaine Willems, Quentin Hennocq, Sara Tunon de Lara, Nicolas Kogane, Vincent Fleury, Romy Rayssiguier, Juan José Cortés Santander, Roberto Requena, Julien Stirnemann and Roman Hossein Khonsari, for their research into whether the hair on the heads of most people in the Northern Hemisphere rotates in the same direction (clockwise or counterclockwise?) as the hair on the heads of most people in the Southern Hemisphere.
Medicine Award
Lieven A. Schenk, Tahmine Fadai and Christian Büchel, for demonstrating that counterfeit drugs that cause painful side effects can be more effective than counterfeit drugs that do not cause painful side effects.
Physics Prize
James C. Liao, for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.
Physiology Prize
Ryo Okabe, Toyofumi F. Chen-Yoshikawa, Yosuke Yoneyama, Yuhei Yokoyama, Satona Tanaka, Akihiko Yoshizawa, Wendy L. Thompson, Gokul Kannan, Eiji Kobayashi, Hiroshi Date, and Takanori Takebe, for their discovery that many mammals can breathe through breath. anus.
Probability Prize
František Bartoš, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Alexandra Sarafoglou, Henrik Godmann and many colleagues have shown, both theoretically and through 350,757 experiments, that when you toss a coin, it usually lands on the same side as it started on.
Chemistry Prize
Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn and Sander Woutersen, for the use of chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.
Demographics Award
Saul Justin Newman, for investigating to discover that many of the people famous for their longest lives lived in places where birth and death registration was poor.
Biology Prize
Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen detonated a paper bag next to a cat standing on the back of a cow. They wanted to investigate how and when cows spit out their milk.