Can pigeons guide missiles? Can dead trout swim? Ig Nobels celebrate weirdest research
CBC
The man who first documented homosexual necrophilia between two mallard ducks stood at a podium on Thursday in front of a panel of revered Nobel laureates, and held up the taxidermied remains of the befouled fowl in question.
"This is the duck. This is the dead one," biologist Kees Moeliker declared as he pulled the stuffed corpse from a plastic shopping bag and waved it above his head, generating raucous applause from his scientific peers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Thus began the 34th Ig Nobel prize ceremony.
The annual award show, organized by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine, is a parody of the prestigious Nobel Prizes and a pun on the word "ignoble. It doles out awards for the weirdest and funniest scientific research.
"The criteria to win this prize is first laugh, and then think," Moeliker — the European bureau chief for Annals of Improbable Research, and an Ig Nobel laureate — told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
"But the first and most important thing is to laugh."
This year's prizes celebrated, among other things, research into the feasibility of using pigeons to guide missiles, an experiment in which scientists exploded a paper bag next to a cat standing on the back of a cow, a study that explored the swimming abilities of dead trout, and team of scientists who discovered that many mammals can breathe through their butts.
The research can come from any time, not just the last year.
"Thanks to the wonders of internet, everything is digitized now, so things pop up," Moeliker said.
Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen were posthumously awarded the biology prize for their 1939 paper bag experiment, which, according to the Ig Nobels, was designed to "explore how and when cows spew their milk."
"Back then, animal welfare wasn't a big issue," Moeliker said.
The physics prize went to James Liao, a biology professor at the University of Florida, for his 2004 study on whether dead fish can swim.
His conclusion? Yes — sort of.
"I discovered that a live fish moved more than a dead fish but not by much," Liao said as he accepted the award.
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