Annual Ig Nobel Prizes’ Watch Party Planned for Sept. 19 in Owen Library

As with every year the Ig Nobel Prizes are announced, Emily Cukier has her favorite research winners. Last year, for example, the Physics Prize went to a Harvard University scientist who studied how water currents affect the swimming behavior of a fish. A dead fish.

“Even when the fish can’t move itself, it still ‘swims’ based on its shape and the physics of the water that moves around it. The water ‘swims’ the fish,” said Cukier, science librarian at Owen Science and Engineering Library. “The awards have helped me see different fields of science in a completely new light.”

Owen Library will hold a first-floor watch party of this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes ceremony at noon on Friday, Sept. 19, the day after the actual announcement takes place at Boston University. Free and open to the public, the Owen event includes pizza, trivia, and paper airplane-making.

Ten new Ig Nobel Prize winners will be recognized (by actual Nobel laureates) for scientific contributions that make people laugh, then think, according to the company that sponsors the ceremony, Improbable Research, an international group of “scientists, journalists, teachers, artists, musicians, indescribables, introverts, extroverts, short people and tall people and also medium-size people, each and every one of whom is somewhat delightfully quirky.”

And what could be quirkier than the researchers from The Netherlands and France who performed experiments they called “worm chromatography” to separate drunk and sober worms, earning them last year’s Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize?

Chromatography sends molecules through a substance that has a complicated structure—like a 3D maze—so scientists can learn about the molecules’ properties like shape, charge, or other things based on how quickly they come out the other side, Cukier said. The Ig Nobel Prize winners applied the same technique to living microscopic worms.

“Hilariously, they found that worms that are drunk (a.k.a., exposed to ethanol first) move through the substance slower than worms that are sober,” she said. “This is something that makes complete sense after you hear it, but I never would have thought of using chromatography on something that big. So it’s really helped me think about scientific techniques in a different way.”

Started in 1991, the prizes are named after Ignatius “Ig” Nobel, a distant (fictitious) cousin of Nobel Prize founder Alfred. The name is also a pun on the word “ignoble,” meaning of low birth or common origin. Cukier says the awards make space to acknowledge excellent science that may be overlooked for other prizes because it appears too undignified or absurd.

So whet your appetite for Owen Library’s Sept. 19 watch party with more hilarious and solid research from last year’s list of Ig Nobel Prize winners:

• Peace Prize: B.F. Skinner, for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles. Reference: “Pigeons in a Pelican,” American Psychologist, vol. 15, no. 1, 1960.
• Botany Prize: Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants. Reference: “Boquila trifoliolata Mimics Leaves of an Artificial Plastic Host Plant,” Plant Signaling & Behavior, vol. 17, no. 1, 2022.
• Anatomy Prize: Marjolaine Willems, Quentin Hennocq, Sara Tunon de Lara, Nicolas Kogane, Vincent Fleury, Romy Rayssiguier, Juan José Cortés Santander, Roberto Requena, Julien Stirnemann, and Roman Hossein Khonsari, for studying whether the hair on the heads of most people in the northern hemisphere swirls in the same direction (clockwise or counterclockwise?) as hair on the heads of most people in the southern hemisphere. Reference: “Genetic Determinism and Hemispheric Influence in Hair Whorl Formation,” Journal of Stomatology, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, vol. 125, no. 2, April 2024.
• Medicine Prize: Lieven A. Schenk, Tahmine Fadai, and Christian Büchel, for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side effects. Reference: “How Side Effects Can Improve Treatment Efficacy: A Randomized Trial,” Brain, vol. 147, no. 8, August 2024.
• Physiology Prize: Ryo Okabe, Toyofumi F. Chen-Yoshikawa, Yosuke Yoneyama, Yuhei Yokoyama, Satona Tanaka, Akihiko Yoshizawa, Wendy L. Thompson, Gokul Kannan, Eiji Kobayashi, Hiroshi Date, and Takanori Takebe, for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus. Reference: “Mammalian Enteral Ventilation Ameliorates Respiratory Failure,” Med, vol. 2, issue 6, June 11, 2021.
• Probability Prize: František Bartoš, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Alexandra Sarafoglou, Henrik Godmann, and many colleagues, for showing that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as it started. Reference: “Fair Coins Tend to Land on the Same Side They Started: Evidence from 350,757 Flips,” arXiv 2310.04153, 2023.
• Demography Prize: Saul Justin Newman, for detective work to discover that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping. References: “Supercentenarians and the Oldest-Old Are Concentrated into Regions with No Birth Certificates and Short Lifespans” and “Supercentenarian and Remarkable Age Records Exhibit Patterns Indicative of Clerical Errors and Pension Fraud,” BioRxiv, 704080, 2019 and 2024.
• Biology Prize: Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen, for exploding a paper bag next to a cat that’s standing on the back of a cow to explore how and when cows spew their milk. Reference: “Factors Involved in the Ejection of Milk,” Journal of Animal Science, vol. 1939, issue 1, December 1939.