Ig Nobel Prize: Solving the Mysteries You Didn’t Know Existed

Many look forward to this time of year for different reasons. You may be excited by the change of season. Others might be anticipating the World Series. Those of us on the Commonplace Fun Facts staff turn our attention the announcement of the winners of this year’s Ig Nobel Prize.

The world is full of unanswered questions, but thanks to the quirky geniuses of the IG Nobel Prize winners, some of these puzzles—ones you didn’t even realize needed solving—now have answers. Bizarre research into weird science has enlightened us with such intellectual gems as finding out that some mammals can breathe through their anuses? (Don’t pretend you weren’t curious.) We also now know that flipping a coin doesn’t give you the 50/50 odds we all grew up believing?

Not Your Grandma’s Nobel Prize

Lest you confuse this prize with those Nobel Prizes, rest assured, the IG Nobels are in a league of their own. Their mission? To celebrate the bizarre, honor the imaginative, and make science entertaining by first making you laugh—and then making you think. And this year’s awards delivered just that with their masterful exploration of quirky science.

With appropriate pomp and pageantry (accordion music welcoming guests to their seats, followed by a safety briefing urging everyone not to sit on another person unless you happen to be a child), the wonderful world of weird science was unveiled for all. The real showstoppers? Two official “paper airplane deluges” where the audience gleefully flung paper airplanes at a target on stage. It’s quirky science, but with way more fun and fewer ethics board meetings.

Breathing Through… Wait, Where?

One of the night’s most eyebrow-raising awards went to a Japanese research team, led by Ryo Okabe and Takanori Takebe, for discovering that some mammals can breathe through their anuses. We have long suspected that politicians talk through this part of the anatomy, but the potential applications of this discovery could be life-saving. It has significant implications for medical ventilator technology.

The Japanese researchers, in a burst of curiosity (and perhaps a bit of desperation), started wondering if humans with breathing issues might get some relief by, well, getting oxygen pumped up their backsides. Their inspiration? Animals like loaches, which apparently have the nifty ability to breathe through their intestines. The idea really took off during the COVID crisis when ventilators were in short supply, and hospitals were scrambling for ways to help patients with severe respiratory infections.

Pigeons as Missile Navigators?

In one of the most bizarre entries, the peace prize went to the late American psychologist B.F. Skinner for his attempt to use pigeons to guide missiles. The daring experiment didn’t work, but he got an A for effort. You can watch this video to learn more about the inspired experiments.

Flipping a Coin: What Are the Odds?

When you flip a coin, you’d think it would land heads exactly 50 percent of the time, right? Well, a research team from the Netherlands says, “Not so fast.”

Back in 2007, American mathematician Persi Diaconis proposed a curious theory: a flipped coin is more likely to land on the same side it started on, because it spends more time in the air with that initial side facing up.

Despite numerous coin-flipping experiments, no one had ever taken note of which side was up before the coin left the thumb. Sure, plenty of experiments showed an even split between heads and tails, but none bothered to track the pre-flip side. This detail didn’t escape Frantisek Bartos, a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam and the lead researcher on the study.

To truly put the theory to the test, Bartos and his colleagues recruited 48 people to flip coins a staggering 350,757 times. They meticulously recorded both the starting and landing positions of each toss.

The result? The coin landed on the same side it started on more often than not. While the data hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, it lends strong support to Diaconis’s original prediction, which estimated a same-side outcome would happen about 51 percent of the time.

But the study revealed something else: not all coin tossers are created equal. Some participants showed no bias, while others leaned toward consistent same-side outcomes, raising questions about what truly determines a “fair” coin toss.

“Our experiment suggests it’s not the coin, but the person flipping it,” Bartos said.

Painful Placebos: The More It Hurts, the Better It Works?

Lieven Schenk, Tahmine Fadai, and Christian Büchel took home the Ig Nobel Medicine Prize for proving that fake medicine with painful side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that doesn’t hurt at all. Yes, you read that right—apparently, the more it stings, the better the placebo works.

A spoonful of sugar may help the medicine go down, but that’s only because we all know that unsugared medicine is nasty, right? That’s what this study seems to suggest.

The Swimming Dead

American James Liao snagged the Physics Prize for exploring an unexpected aspect of fluid dynamics—specifically, the swimming abilities of a dead trout.

“I discovered that a live fish moved more than a dead fish but not by much,” Liao explained. “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, recapturing the energy in its environment. A dead fish does live fish things.”

Liao’s 2004 paper can be read here in The Journal of Experimental Biology. 

Drunk Worms, Sober Worms, and Chemistry Shenanigans

What happens when you mix worms and alcohol? Drunk worms, of course! And in a twist only the Ig Nobels could love, Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen won the Chemistry Prize for developing a method to use chromatography to separate the sober worms from their tipsy companions.

This is more efficient than the former method, which involves pulling the worms over to the side of the road and administering roadside field sobriety tests.

Supercentenarians and Fishy Recordkeeping

The Demography Prize went to Saul Justin Newman, who exposed a rather amusing quirk in demographic research: many people famous for their “extraordinarily long lives” just so happened to live in places with terrible birth and death recordkeeping. Coincidence? Newman doesn’t think so.

In two cleverly titled papers, Newman reveals the truth about supercentenarians and their mysterious records. One paper is called “Supercentenarians and the Oldest-Old Are Concentrated into Regions with No Birth Certificates and Short Lifespans.” The other? “Supercentenarian and Remarkable Age Records Exhibit Patterns Indicative of Clerical Errors and Pension Fraud.” Sounds like someone’s been stretching the truth—and maybe their birthdays—just a bit.

Pretend Plants and Prevailing Hair Whorl Currents

In the realm of botany, Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita uncovered evidence that some real plants attempt to mimic nearby fake ones. Prior to this, we all thought the plastic plants were the fakers.

And a French-Chilean team took home the anatomy prize for studying hair whorls to see if they swirl in different directions based on which hemisphere you’re in. We’ve all heard that the water swirls in a different direction as he drains from the sink, depending on which hemisphere it happens. (Spoiler alert: that’s a myth.) Is the same phenomenon true about hair swirls?

The research concluded that hair whorls in children from the Southern hemisphere were oriented counterclockwise more frequently than in children from the Northern hemisphere, indicating possible environmental factors, although the team could not rule out genetic effects from specific population characteristics.

Paper Bags, Cows, Cats, and Milk

Reaching back into the dusty archives of 1930s science, this year’s Ig Nobels gave a nod to an unusual experiment by agricultural researchers Fordyce Ely and William Petersen. Their goal? To “frighten” cows.

Their original method was as bizarre as it sounds: “Frightening at first consisted in placing a cat on the cow’s back and exploding paper bags every 10 seconds for two minutes,” the researchers wrote. Eventually, they realized that popping the bags alone was enough to scare the cows, and the cat was deemed an unnecessary participant in the chaos.

But why go to all this trouble? Naturally, it was in the name of science—to see what effect stress had on a cow’s milk production.

The Prize: Ten Trillion Dollars (Sort Of)

Actual Nobel laureates were on hand to present the IG Nobel winners with their prizes, which included an obsolete Zimbabwean ten-trillion-dollar bill (you can snag one for $22 on eBay if you’re so inclined). Winners also received a “transparent box” containing items linked to this year’s theme, Murphy’s Law. True to form, some items in the box were missing, and the box itself was, of course, “almost impossible to open.”

Because, as we all know by now, if anything can go wrong, the IG Nobel team will turn it into an award-winning experiment.

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