Ig Nobel prize: Studies on airborne rhinos, chewing gum bacteria among winners

A study conducted on 12 airborne rhinoceros is among the recipients of this year’s Ig Nobel prize, which also honoured research on bacteria in chewing gum stuck to pavements, and cockroach-infested submarines with a counterfeit Zimbabwean $10 trillion note cash prize and a paper trophy the winners had to assemble themselves. Instead of the Harvard University, the annual spoof awards presented by Nobel laureates and organized by science humour magazine, Annals of Improbable Research, were held online for a second year in row due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The rhinoceroses research concluded that transporting the animals in the air was safer when they are held upside down, a method used in Namibia and other African countries.

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The research was conducted by Cornell University wildlife veterinarian Robin Radcliffe and his team in collaboration with the Namibian Ministry of Environment, Forestry, and Tourism. 12 tranquillised black rhinoceroses were suspended by their feet from a crane to assess their heart and lung function.

“Namibia was not the first country to move rhinos upside down with helicopters, but they were the first to take a step back and say, ‘hey, let’s study this and figure out, you know, is this a safe thing to do for rhinos?” Radcliffe told BBC News about the first-of-its kind research.

Susanne Schotz from Sweden won the Biology Prize for analysing variations in “purring, chirping, chattering, trilling, tweedling, murmuring, meowing, moaning, squeaking, hissing, yowling, howling, growling, and other modes of cat–human communication.”

The Chemistry Prize went to Jörg Wicker and his team, for chemically analysing the air inside movie theatres. Pavlo Blavatskyy bagged the Economics Prize for discovering that the obesity of a country’s politicians may be a good indicator of that country’s corruption.

The Medicine Prize was won by Olcay Cem Bulut and colleagues for a study on effectiveness of sexual orgasms as decongestant medicines, while Ethan Beseris and colleagues won the Peace Prize for testing the hypothesis that beards had evolved in humans to ward off the threat of punches to the face.