IG NOBELS 2024

This year’s award-winning research included pigeon missiles, drunken worms and the surprising ability to breathe through your anus…

Every year since 1991, a month before the Swedish Academy announces the Nobel Prizes, The Annals of Improbable Research presents its IgNobel Prizes, awarded for “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think”. Most awards go to research published during the previous 12 months, but the 2024 Ig Nobels had a distinctly retro flavour to them, with two awards going to historic experiments. The Peace Prize went to legendary, and these days, infamous, psychologist BF Skinner for work done in WWII to investigate the feasibility of training pigeons to act as missile guidance systems. This involved harnessing the birds above a translucent plastic screen and training them to peck at a projected image of a target and using that to guide the weapon (see FT186:53). A prototype…

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