News: 0174991877

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

34th First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes Awarded (improbable.com)

(Saturday September 14, 2024 @03:00AM (BeauHD) from the unexpected-science dept.)


Longtime Slashdot reader [1]davidwr writes:

> Winners of the [2]34th First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes included studies on hair swirling (natural, not from grade-school bathroom torture), mammals that breath through their anal orifices, and a study on pigeon-guided missiles. There were also prizes for the study of the swimming abilities of a formerly-living trout. "Honors" were also bestowed for research in coin-flipping (no, it's not 50/50), why cows spew milk, and drunken worms, among other topics. Prizes included $10,000,000,000 (in now-worthless Zimbabwe dollars) and items related to Murphy's Law.

>

> Media coverage includes [3]AP , [4]CNN , [5]Gizmodo , [6]Ars Technica , and by the time you read this, [7]probably [8]much [9]more .



[1] https://slashdot.org/~davidwr

[2] https://improbable.com/ig/archive/2024-ceremony/

[3] https://apnews.com/article/ig-nobels-nobel-prizes-annals-of-improbable-research-7944d7df68dee52f1c7879b31d03b510

[4] https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/science/ig-nobel-prize-ceremony-2024-intl-scli/index.html

[5] https://gizmodo.com/2024-ig-nobel-prizes-for-silly-science-include-pigeons-in-missiles-hair-whorls-and-dead-fish-that-swim-2000498301

[6] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/09/meet-the-winners-of-the-2024-ig-nobel-prizes/

[7] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/sep/12/ig-nobel-prize-goes-to-team-who-found-mammals-can-breathe-through-anuses

[8] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2447781-ig-nobel-prizes-2024-the-unexpected-science-that-won-this-year/

[9] https://www.yahoo.com/news/backside-breathing-pigeon-bombers-studies-110102531.html


Some of the studies were intriguing (Score:2)

by Vlad_the_Inhaler ( 32958 )

Demography

Dr Saul Newman at the University of Oxford bagged the demography prize for showing that many claims of people living extraordinarily long lives come from places with short life spans, no birth certificates, and where clerical errors and pension fraud abound. “Extreme old age records are a statistical basket case,” he said. “From the level of individual cases, up to broad population patterns, virtually none of our old-age data makes sense.”

[1]https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10. [biorxiv.org]

[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3

I have my suspicions (Score:2)

by jd ( 1658 )

First, there was the neurological activity of a frozen salmon, and now the swimming ability of a dead trout.

This is clearly evidence that the Illuminati are planning to create an army of undead zombie fish, who will conquer Britain after launching a surprise attack from fish and chip shops.

Re: (Score:2)

by Vlad_the_Inhaler ( 32958 )

Is that an explanation as to how Liz Truss got to Number 10?

In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus,
"one when he was a boy and one when he was a man."
-- Mark Twain