The 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on September 12. Watch the video of the ceremony here.

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.

Here is a photo of the blackboard in MIT building 10, room 250— the venerable lecture hall where the ceremony happened. During the ceremony, artist Keira Lee Rice drew chalk-on-blackboard sketches to illustrate what each of the ten new Ig Nobel Prize winners had accomplished. 

THE 2024 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. (1960)
• BOTANY PRIZE: Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants.
• 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 counter-clockwise?) as hair on the heads of most people in the southern hemisphere.
• 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.
• PHYSICS PRIZE: James C. Liao, for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.
• 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.
• PROBABILITY PRIZE: František Bartoš, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Alexandra Sarafoglou, Henrik Godmann, and many colleagues, for showing, both in theory and by 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as it started.
• CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen, for using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.
• 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.
• 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.

Links to the complete citations and research articles are here.