Homing pigeon missiles, dead trout swimming, butt breathing honored with Ig Nobel Prize

Mad science award ceremony returns to MIT after four years online

With less than a month to go before the Nobel Prizes are handed out for the most worthy scientific discoveries of the preceding year, it would be remiss of The Register not to observe the honors conferred by the gong's bratty little brother, the Ig Nobel Prize.

The satirical ceremony has been run annually since 1991 by the scientific humor mag Annals of Improbable Research, which serves the laudable goal of highlighting "research that makes people laugh... then think." In other words, the quirky, trivial, inane, and insane.

It's just a bit of absurdist fun – winners are awarded tacky trophies, this time a piece of paper saying they've won an Ig Nobel Prize, and the traditional 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars (a deprecated currency that had a penchant for hyperinflation), but actual Nobel laureates perform the prize-giving, and they looked thrilled to be there.

10 trillion dollar Zimbabwean bank note

10 trillion dollar Zimbabwean bank note

You might recall previous Ig Nobel hits like how wombats poop cubes, the chap who LARPed as a badger, and the miraculous properties of bacon.

Thursday's ceremony was special in that it marked a return to the award's spiritual home of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after four years of taking place online thanks to the pandemic. This year's theme was "Murphy's Law" – cheered by the audience whenever mentioned, as is also tradition – and a particularly apt one at that given the typically chaotic proceedings.

Youtube Video

The ten award winners are listed here for your very serious research purposes:

So who knew? The homing pigeon weapon from the Worms games had some grounding in actual science, and we will watch follow-up studies into butt breathing with great interest. It sure beats having tobacco smoke blown up one's rectum, which was something doctors in the 1700s actually used to do to resuscitate the presumed dead – hence the phrase.

Thankfully, we've moved onto defibrillators. ®

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