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IG Nobel Prize Winners Announced

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The Ig Nobel Prizes honour the achievements that make people laugh…. then think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual and imaginative, to encourage people’s interest in science, medicine and technology. This year the prizes were handed out in an online ceremony on 9th September at Harvard University.

2021 Winners – Transportation Prize

This year the Transportation prize went to a Namibian rhino study by Robin Radcliffe and colleagues, for determining by experiment whether it is safer to transport an airborne rhinoceros upside down. The team wanted to discover if the health of rhinos would be compromised when hung upside down beneath a helicopter.

It is actually better for rhinos to be held by their ankles than on their side – Namibian Ministry of Environment

In collaboration with the Namibian Ministry of Environment, Forestry, and Tourism, the team suspended 12 tranquillised black rhinoceroses by their feet from a crane. They measured the animal’s heart and lung functions to see how they cope with upside down flying.

They found that the rhinos coped very well! Evidence showed that the rhinos did better in this unusual position than when simply lying chest down or on their side.

I think the reason for that is, when a rhino is on its side, you have positional effects of blood flow. So in other words, the lower parts of the lung are getting lots of blood flow for gas exchange, but the upper part of the lung, just because of gravity, is not getting perfused well, so when a rhino is hanging upside down, it’s basically like it’s standing upside up; the lung is equally perfused.

“We’ve also seen that rhinos that are on their side too long, or on their sternum, especially – they get muscle damage, they get myopathy, because they’re so heavy. And there’s no pressure on their legs, other than the sense of the strap around their ankle,” Robin explained.

This experiment has not only changed rhino location techniques, but has also shown it can be used on other wildlife, although more experiments are needed to see how it effects species such as elephants, buffalo, hippo and even giraffe.

You can read their research paper – The Pulmonary and Metabolic Effects of Suspension by the Feet Compared with Lateral Recumbency in Immobilized Black Rhinoceroses (Diceros bicornis) Captured by Aerial Darting – at Science Daily

Other 2021 Winners

Biology Prize: Susanne Schötz – analysing variations in purring, chirping, chattering, trilling, tweedling, murmuring, meowing, moaning, squeaking, hissing, yowling, howling, growling, and other modes of cat-human communication.

Ecology Prize: Leila Satari and colleagues – using genetic analysis to identify the different species of bacteria that reside in wads of discarded chewing gum stuck on pavements.

Chemistry Prize: Jörg Wicker and colleagues – chemically analysing the air inside movie theatres, to test whether the odours produced by an audience reliably indicate the levels of violence, sex, antisocial behaviour, drug use, and bad language in the movie the audience is watching.

Economics Prize: Pavlo Blavatskyy – discovering that the obesity of a country’s politicians may be a good indicator of that country’s corruption.

Medicine Prize: Olcay Cem Bulut and colleagues – demonstrating that sexual orgasms can be as effective as decongestant medicines at improving nasal breathing.

Peace Prize: Ethan Beseris and colleagues – testing the hypothesis that humans evolved beards to protect themselves from punches to the face.

Physics Prize: Alessandro Corbetta and colleagues – conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not constantly collide with other pedestrians.

Kinetics Prize: Hisashi Murakami and colleagues – conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do sometimes collide with other pedestrians.

Entomology Prize: John Mulrennan Jr and colleagues – for their research study “A New Method of Cockroach Control on Submarines”.

Find out more

You can read more about the Ig Nobel Prize awards and all the winners on the Improbable Research website

They will also be explaining the winner’s experiments and research in informal lectures which you can watch over the coming weeks on their YouTube channel. The Transportation Prize lecture will take place on 30th September.

Main picture – Endangered black rhinos are moved to ensure genetic diversity in breeding – Namibian Ministry of Environment