Annual Ig Nobel awards presented by genuine Nobel laureates celebrate quirky scientific research that makes people think.
The 10 prizes cover a range of topics including anatomy, physiology, chemistry, biology, probability and peace.
Winning research included pigeon-guided missiles, dead trout swimming, painful fake medicines and coin flipping.
Organised by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, the annual prize ceremony held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, celebrates hilarious research that spurs interest in science. And the awards are presented by genuine Nobel laureates.
Among the other eight winners was a team that showed how the hair on your head swirls in a different direction depending on whether you live in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere.
A study showing how painful side-effects can make fake medicine more effective, and another revealing a flipped coin is more likely to land on the same side it started on, also got a gong.
As did scientists who popped paper bags next to a cat standing on a cow, and those who revealed how mammals can breathe through their anus — in an emergency.
‘Kamikaze’ pigeons
The psychologist and inventor BF Skinner is best known for his theory of “operant conditioning”, that says you can use rewards to teach behaviour.
It’s an idea he put into practice in the 1940s, when he trained pigeons to guide bombs to their target.
One of Dr Skinner’s daughters, Julie Vargas, a behaviour analyst herself, explained:
“Pilots were having a hard time hitting enemy ships. They had to get so low to hit the target properly they often lost their lives.”
Enter the top-secret Project Pigeon.
While pondering missile guidance systems, Dr Skinner became inspired by the deft manoeuvring of birds in the sky.
He thought they could be used to pilot bombs and initially tried training crows, “but they were too aggressive”, Dr Vargas said.
So Dr Skinner decided to train a set of “kamikaze” pigeons, and built a contraption that fitted on the front of a missile to accommodate avian pilots.
He then used movies to train each pigeon to steer a missile towards a ship. The bird had to peck repeatedly on the image of a ship as it got bigger in the screen (as it would in real life as the bomb fell through the air) to be rewarded with food.
Despite initial scepticism, Dr Skinner got several grants for his feasibility study.
Although electronic guidance systems won out in the end, the same kind of methods have been used to train birds to identify survivors at sea, Dr Vargas said.
Dr Skinner’s work was eventually declassified and described in a 1960 issue of American Psychologist where he wrote:
The ethical question of our right to convert a lower creature into an unwitting hero is a peacetime luxury.
In recognition, his work was awarded the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize for Peace.
