A study that explores whether pigeons could guide missiles? An analysis of the swimming skills of dead fish? These are examples of winners of this year’s Ig Nobels. The awards are intended to make people laugh—and think.
Each year, the Annals of Improbable Research magazine holds a ceremony. The event takes place less than a month before the announcement of the prestigious Nobel Prizes. Known as the Ig Nobels, these prizes celebrate comical scientific achievement.
Ig Nobel winners are serious scientists. But even serious research can veer into the absurd. Still, a ceremony that laughs at instances of scientific silliness can be a refreshing example of not taking oneself too seriously.
The 34th annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony took place on September 12 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This year’s theme was “Murphy’s Law.” The law is often stated as “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Winners received a clear box labeled as an “Official Unofficial Murphy Brand Full-Scale Glue-the-Pieces-Together Historic Rocket Sled Kit.” In accordance with the 2024 theme, many pieces are missing and the box is almost impossible to open. Winners also received a nearly worthless Zimbabwean $10 trillion bill.
In a quirky nod to the other awards with a similar name, actual Nobel laureates hand the Ig Nobel winners their prizes.
“While some politicians were trying to make sensible things sound crazy, scientists discovered some crazy-sounding things that make a lot of sense,” said Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies, in an e-mail interview.
Early in the awards ceremony, someone came on stage wearing a yellow target and a plastic face mask. People in the audience threw paper airplanes at the target. There was also a song competition, featuring a ballad about coleslaw and another about the legal system.
Ig Nobel winners included scientists who studied a vine from Chile that mimics the shapes of nearby fake plants. Another study examined whether the hair on people’s heads in the Northern Hemisphere swirled the same direction as hair in the Southern Hemisphere.
Other winners were scientists who showed that a placebo (fake medicine) that causes side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that doesn’t cause side effects.
Julie Skinner Vargas accepted the Ig Nobel peace prize on behalf of her late father B.F. Skinner. He famously experimented with how rewards and punishments affect behavior.
Skinner directed a pigeon-missile study during World War II. He tried to train pigeons to guide bombs aboard missiles. The U.S. Navy scrapped the bird-brained study—but not before at least one feathered trainee could peck at a target on a screen 10,000 times in 45 minutes.
“I want to thank you for finally acknowledging his most important contribution,” Vargas joked. “Thank you for putting the record straight.”
Biology professor James Liao accepted the Ig Nobel Physics prize. His study demonstrated and explained the swimming abilities of a dead trout.
“I discovered that a live fish moved more than a dead fish, but not by much,” Liao said, holding up a fake fish during the ceremony. “A dead trout towed behind a stick also flaps its tail to the beat of the current, like a live fish surfing on swirling eddies.”
Liao’s fishy summary? “A dead fish does live fish things.”
