Pigeon-guided bombs, dead trout and hair whorls triumph at spoof Nobel prizes

A Second World War project which involved training pigeons to pilot bombs has won this year’s spoof Nobel peace prize.

The Ig Nobel gongs – awarded annually by the science humour magazine the Annals of Improbable Research – celebrate unusual areas of research that “make people laugh, then think”.

Professor Burrhus Frederic Skinner, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota in the US, received the posthumous gong for his work on Project Pigeon, where he was able to teach pigeons to guide missiles with some success.

But the project never took flight because of scepticism from the US military and government officials.

However, Prof Skinner stood by the research, writing in a summary of the project published in 1960: “Call it a crackpot idea if you will. It is one in which I have never lost faith.”

The anatomy prize went to a team of scientists in France who wanted to investigate whether hair on the heads of most people in the Northern Hemisphere swirled in the same direction – clockwise or anticlockwise – as those from the Southern Hemisphere.

Study author Khonsari Roman, professor of maxillofacial surgery at the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris, said: “As a whole, clockwise whorl are considerably more common all over the world.

“Nevertheless, counter-clockwise whorls seem to be more prevalent in the Southern Hemisphere.”

He said there is may be an “unknown mechanism” that leads to clockwise whorls in general but the team does not yet know why people in the Southern Hemisphere are more likely to have anticlockwise swirls.

Counter-clockwise whorls seem to be more prevalent in the Southern Hemisphere

Khonsari Roman

The chemistry award was won by a research team who used used a lab technique to separate drunk and sober worms, while US-based scientists Fordyce Ely and William E Petersen were awarded the biology prize for exploding a paper bag next to a cat standing on the back of a cow with aim to understand more about how and when cows spew their milk.

The two found that cows temporarily stopped ejecting milk when frightened.

An international team of scientists led by academics in Germany picked up the prize for probability, which involved more than 350,000 coin-flipping experiments totalling 650 hours and using 44 different currencies.

The team found that when people flip a coin it “wobbles” in the air, making it more likely to land on the same side it started.

Other awards presented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, US, on Thursday, included the physiology prize for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus and the physics prize for demonstrating the swimming abilities of a dead trout.

James C Liao, professor of biology at the University of Florida in the US, said in 2004 he discovered that fish swim in a flag like flapping motion when towed behind a cylinder and wanted to see if dead fish did the same.

He said: “The dead fish experiment was a quick way to show that just the shape, slime and flexibility of a (dead) fish is enough for it to harness energy to hold position behind the cylinder and even move forward (by accelerating its body against its own drag).”

Prof Liao said that his work could help design better fish passages to help with their migration.

Speaking about the award, he said: “I feel surprised and honoured that it (the research) has been recognised after all these years.

“I’m excited for more people to find out about it, because on the surface the experiment sounds ridiculous, but then as you understand it more, the implications of this curiosity-based science discovery are far-ranging and can also improve on things that humans hold dear.”

Meanwhile, the demography gong went to Dr Saul Justin Newman, senior research fellow at University College London, who discovered some people with the longest lives hailed from places that had poor recordkeeping.

Dr Newman said he became interested in investigating data on humans who live longer than most after debunking two scientific papers about extreme human ageing.

I feel surprised and honoured that it (the research) has been recognised after all these years

Prof James C Liao

He said: “I found that extreme age records appear to be dominantly errors.

“These errors are apparent from unusual patterns in individual cases, scientific studies and entire populations.

“For example, the world’s oldest man, Jiroemon Kimura, has an extraordinary number of biographical anomalies and has three reported birthdays: one that seems to have been forged, one that was a typographic error inserted by demographers, and one that is supposedly real.”

Dr Newman said these anomalies are even larger when analysed across populations.

He said: “Reaching extreme ages is predicted by higher rates of poverty, higher rates of old-age poverty, not having a birth certificate, and amazingly, by having fewer 90-plus year olds in a region, that is, the more 90 year-olds there are in a region, the fewer 105-year-olds.”

Dr Newman said many of these people live in regions known as “blue zones” such as Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy and Loma Linda in California, where it is claimed that people live longer and healthier lives than the average person.

He said: “These regions called blue zones, including Okinawa, seem to have been exploited to sell cookbooks and culturally appropriated lifestyle advice that is contradicted by independent data.”

Dr Newman said Okinawa was promoted as a region that largely eats vegetables and sweet potato but added “none of the lifestyle claims seems to hold up”.