They’re a major ass-et to science.
A team of Japanese scientists who discovered mammals can breathe through their butts — a procedure that could eventually help sick humans get oxygen — received a top “honor” at a Nobel Prize parody ceremony Thursday.
The research team, led by Ryo Okabe and Takanori Takebe, took home the so-called Ig Nobel Prize in physiology for revealing that animals such as mice, rats and pigs can absorb oxygen into their bloodstream via their rectums, the Guardian reported.
At the quirky annual ceremony, scientists win awards for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.”
The rump-centric research potentially offers a new way to help critically ill patients breathe when ventilators or artificial lung supplies aren’t available — like when hospitals were slammed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the scientists say in their paper.
The so-called “enteral ventilation” offers “a new paradigm” to help patients suffering from respiratory failure, the Medical and Dental University researchers wrote in the journal Med in 2021.
Other creative and wacky scientific discoveries, honored at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, focused on everything from strange plant behavior to drunk worms.
A European research team won the probability prize for conducting more than 350,700 experiments to show that a flipped coin generally lands on the same side it started on.
Meanwhile, an Amsterdam-based team of scientists used chromatography — a process for separating components of a mixture — to separate drunk and sober worms.
In the world of botany, Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita won the prize for finding evidence that some real plants try to mimic the leaves of nearby fake plants.
A French-Chilean research team won the anatomy prize for their work studying whether hair swirls in the same direction on the heads of people in the Northern Hemisphere versus the Southern Hemisphere.
At the University of Florida, James Liao’s investigation into the swimming abilities of a dead trout won this year’s physics prize.
The late American psychologist BF Skinner was also posthumously awarded the peace prize for his work using pigeons to guide the flight path of missiles.
Winners took home gag prizes ranging from an obsolete Zimbabwean 10 trillion-dollar bill to a spoof “transparent box” full of items related to “Murphy’s Law.”
Although the tongue-in-cheek award ceremony isn’t officially affiliated with the Nobel Prize, winners were presented with awards by actual Nobel laureates.
