The 2024 Ig Nobel awards were given out this month, recognizing some of the funnier contributions to science. The ceremony, which has been held annually since 1991, tends to highlight the sort of science Big Nobel wouldn’t want you to know about, or at least, science that a bunch of stuffy Swedes don’t recognize.
The Awards are organized by the Annals of Improbable Research, a publication founded by senior editorial staff who quit a different humor magazine, the Journal of Irreproducible Results. They’re given out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (I spit on the name), and offer a prize of 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, a massive amount of money for many of the submitting academics.
This year’s award ceremony was nothing if not endlessly entertaining, with dozens of scientists recognized for their incredible work.
B.F. Skinner (yes, that B.F. Skinner, of Skinner Box fame), was posthumously awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for his work on figuring out if putting pigeons in missiles to guide their flight path would be conducive to accurate missile targeting. With such major breakthroughs as “It doesn’t work like that” and “Why did we give this money again,” Skinner has absolutely left a major mark on the scientific community with his work, and the Ig Nobels were happy to give his daughter, Julie Skinner Vargas, the award.
A team of Swiss, German, and Belgian scientists discovered that fake medicine that caused painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side-effects in a groundbreaking paper published this year in the magazine “Brain.” This discovery will surely change how placebo trials take place going forward, and I fully expect doctors to start handing me rusty nails to swallow, with a promise that they’ll cure my hiccups.
One man made huge leaps in dead fish swimming, and took home the physics prize. James Liao of UCLA put together an interesting report on the swimming abilities of dead trout (the trout having taken one of the earlier painful placebos and dying, this journalist alleges). His discovery might have some actual use to it, seeing as it was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology and seems to hold some significant results for creating swimming robots or other methods of monitoring biological responses to currents.
Gamblers everywhere rejoice at the new findings awarded the Probability Award, showing that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side it started. This research was conducted by flipping a coin some 350,000 times, evidence that I do not think anyone can deny. Take that, various probability courses at CMU, I knew I didn’t do Midterm Problem 3 wrong. I’ll be taking this up with the Statistics and Data Science department, because who the hell is going to flip over a quarter million coins to prove them wrong?
I was only a tiny bit concerned seeing the authors of a paper labeled “Factors Involved in the Ejection of Milk” being awarded the Biology prize this year, but of course, all of that fear was quickly allayed when I realized the experiment was mostly harmless and involved exploding paper bags next to cats on top of cows to monitor milk spew – which was a sentence I did not know I’d ever have to write, but was apparently important enough to merit a publication in the Journal of Dairy Science (an udder-ly mundane magazine), and it was also important enough to merit an award. The paper was initially published in 1941, but recently re-entered the public imagination when a man saw a cat on top of a cow and said “I should blow something up next to that cat.”
Well, in true scientific form, the Ig Nobels have left me with a lot of questions and absolutely no answers whatsoever, so we can chalk up this edition of the awards as a resounding success!
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