Ig Nobel prize awards: Animals that can breathe through their backsides, truth about coin flips

A raft of awards have been handed out for really bizarre research including how some animals can breathe through their backsides.

Mammals that can breathe through their backsides, homing pigeons that can guide missiles and sober worms that outpace drunk ones: these are some of the strange scientific discoveries that won this year’s Ig Nobels, the quirky alternative to the Nobel prizes.

The annual awards “for achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think”, were handed out at a rowdy ceremony at the MIT university in the United States on Thursday evening.

Here are the 10 winners of the 34th edition, held a month before the real Nobel prizes.

Bad breath

The physiology prize went to Japanese and US researchers for discovering that many mammals can breathe through their anuses in emergencies.

They were inspired by loach fishes, which are capable of “intestinal air breathing”, according to their 2021 study.

One award was for research into how homing pigeons that can guide missiles. Picture: iStock

This can also be done by mice, pigs and rats, the researchers found, suggesting that guts could be repurposed as an “accessory breathing organ”.

They even suggested this could be a way to deliver emergency oxygen to patients when there is a ventilator shortage, such as during the Covid pandemic.

Homing pigeon missiles

The peace Ig Nobel went to the late US psychologist BF Skinner, for putting trained pigeons in the nose of missiles to guide them during World War II.

Project Pigeon was called off in 1944 despite a seemingly successful test on a target in New Jersey.

“Call it a crackpot idea if you will; it is one in which I have never lost faith,” Mr Skinner wrote in 1960.

Plastic plant envy

The botany prize was awarded for research which found that some real plants imitate the shapes of nearby plastic plants.

Prize-winner Felipe Yamashita of Germany’s Bonn University said their hypothesis is that the Boquila plant they studied “has some sort of eye that can see”.

“How they do that, we have no idea,” he said to laughter at the ceremony. “I need a job,” he added.

Scientists won an award for research on flipping coins.

Flip off

The probability prize was awarded to researchers who tossed 350,757 coins. Inspired by a magician, the researchers found that the side facing upwards before being flipped won around 50.8 per cent of the time.

Over 81 work days’ worth of flipping, the team had to employ massage guns to soothe sore shoulders.

Lead researcher Frantisek Bartos told AFP the team was excited to become Ig Nobel laureates.

“Although it’s a ‘parody’ prize, it is very nice to have your research highlighted,” he said. “And hopefully it amuses and maybe even inspires a new generation of scientists.”

The true key to longevity

The demography prize was awarded for detective work which discovered that many of the people famous for living the longest happened to live in places with “lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping,” the Ig Nobel website said.

Australian researcher Saul Justin Newman read out a poem at the ceremony which concluded that the real way to longevity is to “move where birth certificates are rare, teach your kids pension fraud and start lying”.

Drunk worm race

The chemistry prize went to a team which used a complex analysis called chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.

The researchers demonstrated the study by re-enacting a race on stage between a sober worm that had been dyed red, and a blue worm they got drunk.

The sober worm won.

Out of this whorl

The anatomy prize went to a team of French and Chilean researchers which found that the hair whorls of most people swirl clockwise -- however in the southern hemisphere, counterclockwise whorls are more common.

Make placebos hurt

The medicine Ig Nobel went to European researchers who demonstrated that fake medicine which causes painful side effects can work better than fake medicine that does not.

Dead fish swimming

The physics prize was awarded to US-based scientist James Liao for “demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout”.

“I discovered that a live fish moves more than a dead fish,” Liao said as he accepted the prize.

Scaredy cat on cow

The biology prize went to the late US-based researchers Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen for a particularly strange experiment in 1941.

They exploded a paper bag next to a cat that was standing on the back of a cow, to “explore how and when cows spew their milk”.

Originally published as Ig Nobel prize awards: Animals that can breathe through their backsides, truth about coin flips