Funny but Serious Science

Organized by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobel Prize is a satirical award honoring achievements that make people laugh, then think. This year’s winners were announced at a lively ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Winning in the category of physiology, a Japanese research team led by Ryo Okabe and Takanori Takebe discovered that mammals could breathe through their anuses, as reported in the research journal Med. Working with mice and pigs, the scientists tested an enema-like procedure called enteral ventilation via anus, which delivers oxygen-carrying liquid to the body through the distal gut. This innovation could eventually be an effective alternative for getting oxygen to critically ill patients when ventilators are in short supply, as was the case during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita won the prize for botany, having found that a flowering plant native to central and southern Chile and Argentina (Boquila trifoliolata) could imitate the shapes of artificial, plastic plants that were placed nearby. In their paper published in Plant Signaling and Behavior, the scientists observed that the real leaves were altered in area, perimeter, length and width, and that the vein pattern of the leaves also changed to be closer to the look of the artificial leaves. The mechanism behind this ability of the plant to “see” the neighboring plant is not yet understood.