The Nobel prize is a serious competition, and one recognizes significant scientific achievements. On the other hand, the Ig Nobels is not a serious competition and recognizes lesser known scientific studies.

For example, among the winners of this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes, which are not affiliated with the original Nobel, include:

• A physics prize, which went to a professor for his study on the swimming ability of dead trout.
• A probability prize, which was awarded to researchers who learned a coin flip is not a 50/50 proposition. To reach their conclusion, they performed 350,757 “experiments” (otherwise known as coin flips).
• A peace prize, which was posthumously bestowed upon B.F. Skinner for his study on the feasibility of housing pigeons inside missiles in order to guide them.
• The anatomy prize went to a study on whether hair swirls in the same direction on the heads of people in the northern hemisphere as in the southern hemisphere.

It's not all fun and games, however, as some of the amusing research can have life-saving results. Among those collecting their prizes was a Japanese research team led by Ryo Okabe and Takanori Takebe who discovered that mammals can breathe through their anuses. They say in their paper that this potentially offers an alternative way of getting oxygen into critically ill patients if ventilator and artificial lung supplies run low, like they did during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In a two-hour ceremony as quirky as the scientific achievements it was celebrating, audience members were welcomed to their seats by accordion music, before a safety briefing warned them not to “sit on anyone, unless you are a child,” not to “feed, chase or eat ducks” and to throw their paper airplane safely. There were two “paper airplane deluges” during the ceremony in which the audience attempted to throw their creations – safely – at a target in the middle of the stage.

Actual Nobel laureates presented the prizes to the ten IG Nobel winners who all won a now obsolete Zimbabwean ten trillion-dollar bill, available for $22 on eBay, and a “transparent box” containing items relating to “Murphy’s Law” – the theme of this year’s ceremony and the principle that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.