The award ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures.
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Meet the winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes
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I'll never grow tired of the old homing pigeon missile story. A few good points made too that I had never really considered about it, in terms of being resistant to jamming and being so simple that production could start in very little time. It's a seemingly outlandish idea that perhaps wasn't entirely outlandish at the time.
Also... is anyone a little freaked out by the idea that plants can maybe see us? I mean... has the philodendron in my living room been spying on me all this time? Does the grass see the lawn mower coming? The horrors...
Edit: Ninja'd on the spy plants. Apparently I'm not the only one creeped out.
Also... is anyone a little freaked out by the idea that plants can maybe see us? I mean... has the philodendron in my living room been spying on me all this time? Does the grass see the lawn mower coming? The horrors...
Edit: Ninja'd on the spy plants. Apparently I'm not the only one creeped out.
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If you can breathe thru your anus, I would guess you could talk out of it as well. This means politicians must qualify as not-all-that distant relatives of the loach, as described in the Physiology award...
Please stop. I'm bored.....
Please stop. I'm bored.....
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Bravo, Jennifer! Entertaining and informative throughout. As a long-time follower of the Ig Nobels, I got the sense that this year's winners were a lot more practical or at least possible to conceive of uses for than those of many past years.
And I'm spooked by the fact that the plants are watching us...
And I'm spooked by the fact that the plants are watching us...
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This puts UFO abductions in a new light. The abductees claim that the aliens are really interested in proctology, but perhaps the aliens were simply trying to keep humans alive in a non-Earth atmosphere?
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Surprised it's only come up now. It's been known about and reported on for years.
Also, I don't keep any plants in my bedroom or my bathroom. Just sayin'.
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You don't have to worry about it until they start mimicking you.
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Is it just novel that someone actually tested this? I mean surely this has been known by every snake oil and tonic salesmen for the past few centuries. Including some liquor or an irritant made the rubes believe it was working, and that's all it takes for a placebo.
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i always love reading about these awards... but that botany resulting in particular is blowing my mind. plant vision, what?? we need more grant funding, stat!
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Yes, but they're not particularly turned on by it. Now, you walk around like that with sphagnum moss jammed in your armpits, you get what you deserve.
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I guess the physiology winners weren't just blowing smoke up people's asses, huh?
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Capsaicin is used medically as a pain relief - however as the 🌶 nasal spray was inside the nose & the heat applied elsewhere - not relevant in this experiment
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None of mine are fat and hairy so I don't think mine do
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About those hair whorls... I want to know if the direction of childrens' hair whorls is influenced by whether the parents were right-handed or left-handed. As an environmental factor, because maybe the whorl direction was influenced by their parents patting the top of their heads when they were babies, or picking them up while supporting them with one hand rather than the other.
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The physiology one makes a lot of sense if you take this into account:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectal_administration
Don't ask me for further details.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectal_administration
Don't ask me for further details.
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Only worry about that if your plants not only had vision, but Slaver Sunflower traits.
I was not surprised to discover about animals able to breathe through their anus: we have all encountered people capable of speaking through theirs.
And the longevity non-scandal hit our household twice. It took my dad well over a year to get a passport because the rural Ohio area where he was born was well-known for lousy record-keeping during the Depression, and my mother-in-law is actually several years older than her official age because her brother decided to "help" her when she applied for naturalization by shaving a few years off her age. She claims not to know how many
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In the Medicine section, this sentence needs some dusting:
"Unbeknownst to the particulates, the nasal sprays did not contain fentanyl."
(I think someone typoed "participants" in a way that confused spell-check.)
"Unbeknownst to the particulates, the nasal sprays did not contain fentanyl."
(I think someone typoed "participants" in a way that confused spell-check.)
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"This one goes in your mouth, this one goes under your arm, this one goes in your butt. Oh, wait..." looks at the three identical nozzles and starts shuffling them around "...this one goes in your mouth, this one goes under your arm, this one goes in your butt..."
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Why do you think they keep dying?
I’ve put the hair whorl study carefully away and will pull it out next time I run into a flat earther.
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Unlikely. There was a (discredited) theory that handedness was determined by which way around your parents held you as a toddler, so that the outer arm became dominant.
Load of codswallop, as things like that are laid down in the brain before birth.
With the hair whorls, I'm inclined to see it as more akin to fingerprints, which are also laid down before birth, so unlikely to change due to environment. Certainly the part in my hair hasn't moved despite my former barber's numerous attempts to put it in on the other side.
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As ridiculous as the anal breathing thing seems, there are medical scenarios where it can be challenging to provide a patient with sufficient oxygen due to lung damage.
Keeping them alive long enough to give their lungs time to heal is difficult - even if they might eventually regain sufficient lung function, they might not make it that long. Existing therapies usually involve trying to flow the same oxygen-infused perfluorocarbons mentioned in the article into the (damaged) lungs and hope that's enough.
Being able to replace or supplement that with an alternative flow of oxygen through unaffected tissues sounds like it could absolutely improve outcomes meaningfully.
Keeping them alive long enough to give their lungs time to heal is difficult - even if they might eventually regain sufficient lung function, they might not make it that long. Existing therapies usually involve trying to flow the same oxygen-infused perfluorocarbons mentioned in the article into the (damaged) lungs and hope that's enough.
Being able to replace or supplement that with an alternative flow of oxygen through unaffected tissues sounds like it could absolutely improve outcomes meaningfully.
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Quiet. You’ll have about a third of our population that will want to string up parents of lefties as baby murderers.
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Sounds kind of dodgy. A quick search suggests only around 25% of identical twins differ in handedness, so that doesn't really hang together.
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It means that jalapeño plant is really, really trying to mimic "you"
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The Physiology prize seems the most significant, especially if you tell the patient that it will hurt.
Joking aside, I'm pretty sure a lot of people died in the pandemic because their lungs were too damaged to take oxygen. So this puts another option on the table.
Joking aside, I'm pretty sure a lot of people died in the pandemic because their lungs were too damaged to take oxygen. So this puts another option on the table.
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Regarding the Physiology prize, maybe those crazy Georgian-period folks were onto something with tobacco smoke enemas used to treat victims of (near) drowning.
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As a social sciene major in undergrad school, I never had much use for B. F. Skinner's ideas.
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