The Ig Nobel Prize, known for celebrating quirky and humorous scientific achievements, recently honored a groundbreaking study that may change the way we think about medical treatments. Other celebrated work includes tossing 350,757 coins to test a hypothesis and telling fast from slow worms with chromatography.
The Ig Nobel Prizes are a playful counterpart to the prestigious Nobel Prizes. They celebrate unconventional scientific research that “first makes people laugh, then makes them think.” Unlike the Nobels, which also come with a big paycheck and recognition, these prizes are more on the lighter side of science — but important, nonetheless. They’re very important in their own right because they challenge our ideas of what science can be, showing that even the strangest experiments can yield valuable insights and push the boundaries of innovation.
Oftentimes, these seemingly quirky studies lead to breakthroughs. Take, for instance, this study that showed how side effects can enhance treatment outcomes through a placebo twist.
Side-effects for better health
Conducted by a team of European researchers, this study involved 77 healthy participants who were led to believe they were receiving a powerful painkiller (fentanyl) through a nasal spray. However, the sprays contained no fentanyl at all. The participants were all getting a placebo.
Some participants were given sprays with capsaicin (the compound that makes peppers feel spicy) while others received saline, which had no side effects. Surprisingly, those who felt the mild burning from capsaicin reported experiencing less pain than those who received the inert saline spray.
The researchers discovered that the burning sensation acted as a signal to the brain, leading participants to believe the treatment was working — even though no actual pain relief was provided. This effect mirrors the placebo phenomenon but with an unusual twist: the side-effect itself became part of the illusion.
Through functional MRI (fMRI) scans, the team observed that the brain’s pain modulation system was more active in participants who experienced the burning sensation, suggesting that the brain was working to suppress pain in response to the perceived effectiveness of the treatment.
This study, which earned an Ig Nobel Prize in medicine, holds profound implications for patient care and clinical trials. By understanding how our expectations can shape treatment outcomes, doctors might someday leverage side effects to enhance the effectiveness of therapies.
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Breathing through your bum
This wasn’t the only attention-grabbing study at the 2024 Ig Nobel awards. The Physiology Prize went to a team of Japanese and American scientists for a study that sounds more like science fiction. These scientists discovered that some mammals, including mice, rats, and pigs, can breathe through their anuses in emergencies. Yes, you read that correctly — when oxygen delivery through the lungs fails, these animals are capable of absorbing oxygen through their rectums.
Dr Takanori Takebe, an author of the study at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre, said he initially had “mixed feelings” about receiving the award. But, in the end, he was happy if it could make people think about his research. If it fuelled interest in enteral ventilation, he said, “I’d be so happy.”
This research, inspired by loach fish known for their “intestinal air-breathing,” arose during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a time when ventilator shortages pushed scientists to think outside the box as people’s lives were desperately at risk. The team found that pumping oxygen through the rectum allowed animals to survive without normal breathing for a limited time.
As bizarre as this sounds, it could offer a new way to support patients with respiratory failure in critical situations. The team is already running trials on humans to see if this technique might one day save lives. As such, the study embodies the spirit of the Ig Nobel awards: quirky at first glance, but actually quite important.
Hair spirals, lifespans and “plant vision”
Roman Khonsari, a craniofacial surgeon at the Necker-Enfants Malades University Hospital in Paris, also took home an award. Along with colleagues, Khonshary studied the global distribution of hair whorls. They found that most scalp hair spirals in a clockwise direction worldwide, but there is more counter-clockwise spiraling in the southern hemisphere and we don’t know why.
“I was operating when I got the call,” Khonsari said. “I was extremely glad because, despite the undeniable irrelevance of this study, I am convinced that deciphering patterns in nature can lead to important discoveries on fundamental developmental mechanisms. Shapes carry interesting amounts of information.”
Dr. Saul Newman, from the University of Oxford, was awarded the demography prize for showing that many people who claim to have lived extraordinarily long lives come from places with short life spans, no birth certificates, and where clerical errors and pension fraud abound. “Virtually none of our old-age data makes sense,” he says.
In botany, Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita won the prize for showing evidence that some real plants attempt to mimic the leaves of nearby fake plants, suggesting that “plant vision” is a plausible hypothesis.
Coins and worms
Another creative idea came from researchers in the Netherlands who treated worms like “active polymers,” based on their activity levels. The researchers used Tubifex tubifex worms as models to study how activity and size affect their movement through confined spaces. They found that by creating a flow through a hexagonal array of pillars, worms could be sorted by their level of activity. Highly active worms moved more quickly through the array, while less active worms got trapped or delayed.
But this isn’t just about worms. By controlling factors like the flow rate and the structure of the channel, the researchers demonstrated a versatile method for sorting active entities. This potentially opens up new applications in studying the behavior of active polymers, robotic systems, and even biological motility in medical contexts.
Other researchers, most of them also Dutch, had a different idea. They flipped 350,757 coins to test a hypothesis put forward by Persi Diaconis. This former magician and professor of statistics at Stanford University suggested that tossed coins are just slightly more likely to land the same way up as they started. The empirical test confirmed this.
Pigeon-guided missiles and scaring dairy
One of the most unusual honors went to the late psychologist B.F. Skinner, who was awarded the Peace Prize posthumously for his work on “Project Pigeon.” During World War II, Skinner proposed using pigeons to guide missiles by training them to peck at a target visible through a glass window. The project was ultimately shelved, although B. F. Skinner went on to become one of the most influential psychologists in history.
Another posthumous award honored the late Fordyce Ely and William Petersen for their 1940 investigation into factors affecting the production of milk in dairy herds. The pair placed a cat on the back of a cow and popped paper bags to see if the milk flow changed. Unsurprisingly, it did.
The cows got spooked and made 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. “Later the cat was dispensed with as unnecessary.”
While these studies might seem whimsical at first glance, they hold important implications for medicine, psychology, and even military applications. The Ig Nobel Prizes remind us that sometimes, the most unconventional research can lead to serious scientific breakthroughs.
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