Ig Nobel Prize 2023: Pigeon-guided missiles and anus-breathing mammals among the winners

A comic take on the more serious Nobel Prize – which will be announced in October – the Ig Nobel prizes celebrate unusual areas of research that “make people laugh, then think”.

The Ig Nobel Prize is a parody of the Nobel Prize, awarded annually for unusual areas of research that “make people laugh, then think”. The 2023 Ig Nobel Prize winners have been announced, and their research topics range from pigeon-guided missiles to mammals capable of breathing through their anus.

Here is a summary of some of the winning entries:

Peace Prize: The late American psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner won the Ig Nobel prize for peace for his Second World War study looking at the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of bombs. It involved placing pigeons in a harness as they pecked at grain from a small dish, with pulleys attached to their heads steering a cart towards a bullseye. The idea was for the trained pigeons to eventually peck at screens to aim a missile at a target in a kamikaze mission. The test runs proved remarkably successful, but the project was shut down.

Physiology Prize: A team from Japan discovered that when some mice or pigs are dangerously deprived of air, they can survive after receiving oxygen through their rectums. The study found that some mammals are capable of breathing through their anus.

Demography Prize: Saul Newman, a research fellow at the University of Oxford, won the Ig Nobel prize for demography for his study that found many of the people claiming to have the longest lives lived in places that had poor birth and death record-keeping. Dr Newman suggested evidence and data for ‘blue zone’ regions, where people live remarkably long lives, “doesn’t seem to stack up”. These include places like Okinawa in Japan and Ikaria in Greece, which are famous for being home to a relatively large number of people aged over 100.

The 10 prize winners were handed their awards by real Nobel laureates at a ceremony on Thursday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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