2024-09-20 22:03:58
Looking back at the 34th edition of the Ig-Nobels, on September 16, at the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. This brilliant parody of the Nobel Prizes awards each year the most unusual and improbable scientific research. On this year’s menu: ventilation through the anus, dead fish swimming and the direction of hair growth.
« Research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think “, is the slogan of Ig Nobel(pun around the ignoble word and the very important Nobel prizes) a ceremony that is eagerly awaited each year, a crazy prelude to the actual awarding Nobel Peace Prizea month later, in Dubai, held at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge. These are the real Nobel Prize winners who, on September 12, presented their prizes to the winners, because this research and eccentric research, an impossible science, often leads to unexpected scientific advances.
Take for example theIg-Nobel in Physiology 2024, given to a group of Japanese researchers for discovering breathing through the anus. It was during the study of the ventilation of the loach, a fish that breathes rectally and intestinally, that they had the idea of trying the experiment with mammals. They gave rats and pigs a perfluorocarbon (PFC) enema rectally and it worked. So we can, in an emergency, breathe through the anus and not just through the lungs. Carried out in the midst of an epidemic Covid 19This study, which shows that air through the anus can prevent respiratory failure in mammals, will be tested on humans. If the lungs don’t work, let’s find other airways, especially rectal. This really deserves an Ig-Nobel Prize for impossible sciences.
Professor James Liao shows a plastic fish as he receives a physics prize for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a fish at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., Wednesday September 12, The year 2024. AP – Steven Senne
But other winners have also done very well, like this French researcher from the Necker-Enfants Malades University Hospital and his team, who won the 2024 Ig-Nobel Anatomy Prize, for their study on the direction of hair growth. Depends on whether you live in North Cork or South Cork. They succeeded in demonstrating that hair cycles are created clockwise in the north while in the south, it is the opposite, the hair grows and rotates in the opposite direction. Enough to walk on your head.
Let’s also mention the Ig-Nobel doctoral prize awarded to a German researcher from the Max Planck Institute who worked on the biological effect and who demonstrated, with his team, that a placebo works best and that it has a strong therapeutic effect when you are not sick or in pain. An injection for example, even with pearl powder, if it tastes good, it is because it will be good. Good to know, or not.
We are in the second degree with the Ig-Nobel prize in physics awarded to a Taiwanese-American researcher from the University of Los Angeles who studied the swimming abilities of dead fish. He also received his gift with a poisonous fish from his hand, because by examining the movement of the dead fish going up he made us know that the body can move by turning, that is what they call the preparation of what you can very useful (not only for fish that have nothing).
How the best of the impossible science will take us and than all the curiosities of all these researchers who are afraid of anything, not even ridicule.
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