The Nobel Prize-winning little brother rewards research that “makes you laugh, then makes you think”. The study of hanging rhinos went to the top this year.
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A group of researchers has investigated the effect of hanging upside down on rhinos. On Friday, they were awarded this year’s Ig Nobel Prize.
The award ceremony is a kind of humorous counterpart to the Nobel Prize. The organizers want to reward and pay attention to research that “first makes people laugh, then makes them think”.
The name is a pun on the English word “ignoble”, which describes something inferior or less honorable, and of course hints at the name of the ordinary award ceremony.
12 hanging rhinos
The organizers behind the award ceremony are the humorous science magazine Annals of Improbable Research.
The rhino study fully fulfills the motto of the award, because what could seem more foolish than hanging 12 rhinos upside down for 10 minutes?
Veterinarian Robin Radcliffe and his colleagues from Cornell University performed this experiment because they wanted to know if the animals could be harmed by hanging from their feet under a helicopter.
It is a method that is increasingly used in population conservation work in Africa when they are moved from one habitat to another.
But no one has really questioned whether this activity can affect the anesthetized animals’ heart and lung functions while flying upside down.
Therefore, Radcliffe and his research team, in collaboration with the Namibian Ministry of the Environment, started the project where they tied 12 anesthetized rhinos on their feet hanging from a crane, and measured their physical response.
It turned out that the animals coped very well. The studies documented that it was actually better for the rhinos to hang from their feet, than to lie on their chest or side.
10 trillion Zimbabwe dollars
Friday’s prizes were awarded by previous Nobel Prize winners such as Frances Arnold (Chemistry, 2018), Carl Weiman (Physics, 2001) and Eric Maskin (Economics, 2007).
The prize itself was a trophy that the winners themselves had to print out from a pdf file and a cash amount in the form of a counterfeit 10 trillion dollar bill on a bank statement from Zimbabwe.
When award winner Robin Radcliffe was asked what to do with the money, he flirted before answering:
– We always need support for research.
Prizes were also awarded for research projects in various disciplines. Here are some of them.
The Biology Prize was awarded to Susanne Schötz for analyzes of variations between reminders, small talk, meowing, murmuring, whistling, rumbling, painting, whistling, yawning, and other forms of communication between cat and human.
The Economics Prize went to Pavlo Blavatsky, who has discovered that obesity among a country’s politicians can be a good indicator of the degree of corruption in the country.
The Peace Prize was awarded to Ethan Beseris and his colleagues for testing the hypothesis that humans developed beards to protect themselves from blows to the face.
WATCH VIDEO: The rhino terrified the little cardboard figure.
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