Ig Nobel Prize: Scientists who discovered that mammals can breathe through the anus receive award

CNN
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The world still holds many unanswered questions. But thanks to the efforts of the research teams awarded the IG Nobel Prize on Thursday, there are now answers to some of those questions – some you might not have even thought existed.

We now know that many mammals can breathe through their anuses, that the odds of a coin landing on heads or tails are not equal, that some real plants somehow mimic the shape of neighboring artificial plastic plants, that artificial drugs with painful side effects can be more effective than those with no side effects, and that many of the people famous for their old age lived in places where record-keeping was poor.

The awards – which have no connection with the Nobel Prize – are intended to “celebrate the unusual, honor the ingenious – and stimulate people’s interest in science, medicine and technology” by “making people laugh and then think.”

In a two-hour ceremony as quirky as the scientific achievements being celebrated, audience members were welcomed to their seats with accordion music before a safety briefing warned them not to “sit on anyone unless they're a child,” “not to feed, chase or eat ducks,” and to throw their paper airplanes carefully. During the ceremony, two “paper airplane floods” occurred, with audience members attempting to throw their creations – safely – at a target in the center of the stage.

Among the award winners was a Japanese research team led by Ryo Okabe and Takanori Takebe, who discovered that mammals can breathe through their anus. In their paper, they write that this may provide an alternative way to deliver oxygen to critically ill patients when ventilator and artificial lung supplies run low, as has been the case during the Covid-19 pandemic.

American psychologist BF Skinner was posthumously awarded the Peace Prize for his work attempting to use pigeons to determine the trajectory of rockets, and a European team of researchers received the Probability Prize for conducting 350,757 experiments to prove that when a coin is tossed, it tends to land on the same side it started on.

Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita won the Botany Prize for their discovery that some real plants try to imitate the leaves of artificial plants near them. James C. Liao won the Physics Prize for his demonstration and explanation of how a dead trout swims. And a French-Chilean research team won the Anatomy Prize for their investigation into whether the hair on the head of people in the Northern Hemisphere swirls in the same direction as those in the Southern Hemisphere.

Some awards ceremonies were accompanied by live demonstrations to illustrate the experiments. For example, Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen were posthumously awarded the Biology Prize for exploding a paper bag next to a cat standing on the back of a cow to investigate the reasons why cows spit up their milk.

To accept the Chemistry Prize, a Dutch-French research team also presented a live demonstration in which they explained how they used chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.

The awards were presented by real Nobel laureates to the ten IG Nobel laureates, who all won a now-obsolete Zimbabwean ten trillion dollar bill, which can be bought on eBay for $22, and a “transparent box” containing items related to “Murphy's Law” – the theme of this year's ceremony and the principle that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. In this regard, the presenters said that some of the items in the box were missing and the box itself was “almost impossible to open.”