THE IG NOBEL PRIZES - 2024

Established in 1991, the IG NOBEL prizes are a good-faith parody of the Nobel Prizes - celebrating accomplishments in the Nobel fields that seem ridiculous at first glance. But the IG NOBEL motto, "Laugh first, then think." makes you realize that these endeavors can often provide valuable scientific or humanitarian information. Still, they do seem ridiculous. For a further explanation of the IG NOBEL prize, please see the original post on 10/13/2020.

Winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes

Anatomy

Researchers led by Roman Hossein Khonsari of Paris Cite` University for the paper "Genetic Determinism and Hemispheric Influence in Hair Whorl Formation," in which they attempted to determine  whether the hemisphere one was born in has any impact on the direction - clockwise or counter-clockwise - of one's hair whorls.

Biology (posthumous)

Based on work repotrted in 1939, Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen for exploding a paper bag next to a cat that's standing on the back of a cow, to determine how and when cows spew their milk. 

Botany

University of Bonn's Felipe Yamashita and independent researcher Jacob White for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants.

Chemistry

Tess Heeremans and others at the University of Amsterdam for using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms. They separated sluggish worms that had been exposed to  an ethanol solution from more active sober worms.

Medicine

University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf researchers led by Lieven A. Schenk for an experiment involving a nasal spray that contained the peppery compound capsaicin. Their work showed that fake medicine that causes painful side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side effects.

Physics 

University of Florida biologist James C. Liao for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout. In a remarkable example of passive thrust production, the natural flexibility of a trout corpse causes it to frequently surge upstream.

 

Physiology 

A team led by Takanori Takebe, a doctor and scientist at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, discovered that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus. Regular readers of Newscripts will be familiar with this work on rear-end respiration.