Ig Nobel Winners Include Dead Trout, Drunk Worms

Thursday was the biggest night on the calendar for weird science. The Annals of Improbable Research handed out Ig Nobel prizes honoring researchers including a Japanese team that found many mammals can breathe through their anuses. They won the Physiology prize for their research on "enteral ventilation," which involved delivering oxygen to mice, rats, and pigs through their rectums, the Guardian reports. Other winners:

• Peace: Most of the studies were recent, but the Peace prize went to late psychologist BF Skinner for a 1960 paper that described efforts in the early 1940s to develop a missile guidance system that involved live pigeons inside the missiles, Ars Technica reports. He called ethical questions a "peacetime luxury." The prize was collected by his daughter.

• Botany: Scientists found "evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants," per the Annals of Improbable Research. They concluded that "plant vision" is possible.
• Anatomy: A team studied "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."
• Physics: A team demonstrated that trout can use the power of swirling vortices to move upstream without expending energy. They wrote that a dead rainbow trout "had unnervingly similar kinematics to a live fish, with the exception that it cannot put on the brakes," per Ars Technica.
• Chemistry: A Dutch team used a novel technique to investigate polymer dynamics, the Scientist reports. They raced drunk and sober worms through a chromatography maze. The sober ones finished first.

• Biology: This posthumous prize went to Dutch researchers who determined in 1940 that startled cows produce less milk. "Frightening at first consisted in placing a cat on the cow's back and exploding paper bags every 10 seconds for two minutes," the researchers wrote, per the Guardian. "Later the cat was dispensed with as unnecessary."
• Probability: A team of around 50 researchers determined, with 350,757 coin flips, that a tossed coin is slightly more likely to land the same way up that it started with.
• Medicine: Researchers demonstrated "that fake medicine that causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side-effects," per the Annals.
• Demography: University of Oxford researcher Saul Newman found that "many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death record keeping." "Extreme old age records are a statistical basket case," he says. "From the level of individual cases, up to broad population patterns, virtually none of our old-age data makes sense."

(More Ig Nobel Prizes stories.)