Study that hung rhinos upside down from a helicopter wins Ig Nobel Prize 2021

The Ig Nobel Prize has been granted yearly from 1991 to ten unique or unlikely scientific achievements, with the declared goal of "honouring breakthroughs that first make people laugh, and then make them think."

The award's name is a joke on the Nobel Prize, which it mocks, as well as the adjective ignoble (not noble).

The Ig Nobel Prizes are delivered by Nobel prize winners at a ceremony at Harvard University's Sanders Theater, followed by public lectures by the winners at MIT. It is hosted by the scientific comedy journal Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). Because the ceremony could not be held at its normal location of Harvard University in the US due to COVID-19 limitations, the event was held entirely virtually. This year's Ig Nobel Prize for Transportation Research went to an experiment in which rhinoceroses were hung upside down to examine what effect it had on the animals.

In Namibia, wildlife veterinarian Robin Radcliffe of Cornell University and colleagues conducted the experiment to see if the animals' health would be jeopardised by being hung by their legs beneath a helicopter.

Namibia has become the first country in the world to use helicopters to transport rhinos upside down. It's a technique that's becoming more popular in African conservation efforts to move rhinos between divided habitat areas.

No one had performed any basic research to see if the heavily sedated animals' hearts and lungs could deal with upside-down flying. In partnership with the Namibian Ministry of Environment, Forestry, and Tourism, Robin and his team used a crane to hold 12 tranquilised black rhinoceroses by their feet and examined their physical responses.

The rhinos, it turns out, functioned impressively. According to Radcliffe, when a rhino is hanging upside down, the upper half of its lung is not properly perfused, thus it appears to be standing upside down rather than chest down or on its side. "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,” said this year’s winner.

The prizes were presented on the night by real Nobel laureates, including Frances Arnold (chemistry, 2018), Marty Chalfie, and Eric Maskin (economics, 2007), as has been tradition with the Ig Nobels. The winners received a trophy that they had to design themselves from a PDF printout, as well as a money prize in the form of a replica $10 trillion Zimbabwe banknote, which Robin plans to use for grants. Team-member and wildlife doctor Pete Morkel remarked, "This has really changed rhino translocation, and even more so elephant translocation. Picking these big animals up by their feet - it's now accepted. The next thing we've got to do is some research on other species like buffalo, hippo, and maybe even giraffe."

In recent years, the winners featured Alligator on gas snaps in 2020, research on testicles warmth in 2019, and roller coaster therapy in 2018. Teams studying the germs in chewing gum clinging to sidewalks and how to manage cockroaches on submarines were among the other finalists. The imitation Nobels aren't quite as famous as the "actual" Nobels.

The winners of Ig Nobel Prize for 2021 include:

• Susanne Schötz (Biology)
• Leila Satari (Ecology)
• Jörg Wicker and colleagues (Chemistry)
• Pavlo Blavatskyy (Economics)
• Olcay Cem Bulut and colleagues (Medicine)
• Ethan Beseris and colleagues (Peace)
• Alessandro Corbetta and colleagues (Physics)
• Hisashi Murakami and colleagues (Kinetics)
• John Mulrennan Jr and colleagues (Entomology)
• Robin Radcliffe and colleagues (Transportation)