Weird & Interesting science, take 2

[robkelk]

...
If this one isn't nominated for an Ig Nobel, I'll be very surprised.

I'm very surprised.

Meet the winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes

Peace: B.F. Skinner, for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles.

Botany: Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants.

Anatomy: Marjolaine Willems, Quentin Hennocq, Sara Tunon de Lara, Nicolas Kogane, Vincent Fleury, Romy Rayssiguier, Juan José Cortés Santander, Roberto Requena, Julien Stirnemann, and Roman Hossein Khonsari, for studying 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.
(Spoiler: The hemisphere doesn't make a difference.)

Medicine: Lieven A. Schenk, Tahmine Fadai, and Christian Büchel, for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side effects.

Physics: James C. Liao, for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.
(Spoiler: Dead trout can swim upstream. They just can't stop.)

Physiology: Ryo Okabe, Toyofumi F. Chen-Yoshikawa, Yosuke Yoneyama, Yuhei Yokoyama, Satona Tanaka, Akihiko Yoshizawa, Wendy L. Thompson, Gokul Kannan, Eiji Kobayashi, Hiroshi Date, and Takanori Takebe, for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus.
(Insert your favourite politician joke here.)

Probability: František Bartoš, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Alexandra Sarafoglou, Henrik Godmann, and many colleagues, for showing, both in theory and by 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side that it started.

Chemistry: Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen, for using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.

Demography: Saul Justin Newman, for detective work in discovering that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping.

"If equivalent rates of fake data were discovered in any other field... a major scandal would ensue," Newman wrote. "In demography, however, such revelations seem to barely mention citation."

Biology: Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen, for exploding a paper bag next to a cat standing on the back of a cow to explore how and when cows spew their milk.