2024’s Ig Nobel Winners Include Studies on Coin Flips and Breathing Through Your Butt

This year’s Ig Nobel Prize winners were announced the other day. It’s like the Nobel Prize for the weirdest and DUMBEST insights science offered us in 2024. Here are this year’s winners…

1. You can breathe through your butt! Researchers found many mammals are capable of it. The study showed doctors might be able to treat things like covid using a special mixture of oxygenated liquid.

2. A team in Amsterdam did 350,000 coin flips and found it’s not really 50/50. Coins are slightly more likely to land on the same side they started on.

3. This year’s Peace Prize went to a study that looked at whether you could put pigeons inside missiles to help guide them.

4. The Botany Prize went to a study that found some plants will imitate the shapes of fake, plastic plants if you put them next to each other.

5. The Anatomy Prize went to a study that looked at the direction your hair swirls in, and whether it’s affected by the hemisphere you’re born in. Kind of like the myth that toilets flush in opposite directions.

6. The Prize for Medicine went to a study that found placebos work better if they cause a few painful side-effects.

7. The Physics Prize went to a study that looked at the swimming abilities of dead trout.

8. The Chemistry Prize went to a study that used a process called chromatography to make drunk and sober worms race each other.

9. The Biology Prize went to an old study from 1941, where researchers popped brown paper bags while a cat stood on a cow’s back. (???) They were apparently trying to see if they could scare cows into producing more milk.

10. The Prize for Demographics went to a study that found places where people supposedly live the longest tend to have poor recordkeeping when it comes to when people were born.

(UPI)