The world still holds many unanswered questions. But thanks to the efforts of the research teams awarded the IG Nobel Prize on Thursday, some of these questions – which you might not even have thought existed – now have answers.

世界上仍有许多未解之谜。但多亏了周四获得搞笑诺贝尔奖的研究团队的努力，其中一些你可能甚至都没想过会存在的问题，现在有了答案。

We now know that many mammals can breathe through their anuses, that there isn't an equal probability that a coin will land on head or tails, that some real plants somehow imitate the shapes of neighboring fake plastic plants, that fake medicine which causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine without side-effects, and that many of the people famous for reaching lofty old ages lived in places that had bad record-keeping.我们现在知道，许多哺乳动物可以通过肛门呼吸；硬币落地时正面或反面向上的概率并不相等；一些真正的植物会以某种方式模仿相邻的假塑料植物的形状；带有痛苦副作用的假药有时比没有副作用的假药更有效；而且，许多以长寿著称的人物，其实生活在记录管理不完善的地方。

The awards – which have no affiliation to the Nobel Prizes – aim to "celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative – and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology" by making "people laugh, then think."“搞笑诺贝尔奖”与真正的诺贝尔奖并无关联， 其宗旨是通过幽默的方式让人们发笑并思考，从而“庆祝不同寻常，表彰富有想象力的人，并激发人们对科学、医学和技术的兴趣”。



In a two-hour ceremony as quirky as the scientific achievements it was celebrating, audience members were welcomed to their seats by accordion music, before a safety briefing warned them not to "sit on anyone, unless you are a child," not to "feed, chase or eat ducks" and to throw their paper airplane safely. There were two "paper airplane deluges" during the ceremony in which the audience attempted to throw their creations – safely – at a target in the middle of the stage.在两个小时的颁奖典礼上，气氛轻松幽默，与所庆祝的科学成就相得益彰。观众在风琴音乐的伴奏下入座， 随后是安全简报，提醒大家不要“坐在任何人身上，除非你是小孩”，“不要喂食、追逐或吃鸭子”，并要安全地扔出纸飞机。在颁奖典礼上，观众两次试图安全地将自己的纸飞机投向舞台中央的目标，上演了两场“纸飞机洪水”。

Among those collecting their prizes was a Japanese research team led by Ryo Okabe and Takanori Takebe who discovered that mammals can breathe through their anuses. They say in their paper that this potentially offers an alternative way of getting oxygen into critically ill patients if ventilator and artificial lung supplies run low, like they did during the Covid-19 pandemic.领奖者中包括由Ryo Okabe和Takanori Takebe领导的日本研究团队，他们发现哺乳动物可以通过肛门呼吸。他们在论文中指出，如果呼吸机和人工肺供应不足，就像新冠疫情期间那样，这可能会为重症患者提供一种获取氧气的替代方法。

American psychologist B.F Skinner was posthumously awarded the peace prize for his work attempting to use pigeons to guide the flight path of missiles, while a European-wide research team was awarded the probability prize for conducting 350,757 experiments to demonstrate that a coin tends to land on the same side it started when it is flipped.美国心理学家B.F.Skinner在去世后被授予了和平奖，以表彰他尝试利用鸽子来引导导弹飞行路径的研究。同时，一个欧洲研究团队因进行了350757次实验，证明了硬币在翻转后往往落在与起始面相同的一侧，而荣获了概率奖。

Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita won the botany prize for finding evidence that some real plants attempt to mimic the leaves of nearby fake plants, James C. Liao won the physics prize for demonstrating and explaining how a dead trout swims, and a French-Chilean research team won the anatomy prize for studying whether hair swirls in the same direction on the heads of people in the northern hemisphere as in the southern hemisphere.Jacob White和Felipe Yamashita因发现真实植物会试图模仿附近假植物的叶子而获得了植物学奖。James C. Liao则因成功演示并解释了死鳟鱼如何游动而摘得了物理学奖。此外，一个法国-智利研究团队还因研究北半球和南半球人头部的发旋是否朝同一方向而获得了解剖学奖。

Live demonstrations to illustrate the experiments involved accompanied some of the prize-giving, including when Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen were posthumously awarded the biology prize for exploding a paper bag next to a cat that's standing on the back of a cow to explore the reasons for cows spewing their milk.在颁奖典礼上，部分奖项的颁发伴随着生动的现场实验演示。比如，尽管Fordyce Ely和William E.Petersen已经离世，但他们的研究——通过在奶牛背上站立的猫旁边引爆纸袋来探究奶牛喷奶的原因——依然荣获了生物学奖。

A Dutch-French research team also produced a live demonstration when they collected the chemistry prize to explain how they used chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.同样，一个荷兰-法国研究团队在领取化学奖时也进行了现场演示，他们巧妙地展示了如何通过色谱法区分出醉酒的蠕虫与清醒的蠕虫。

Actual Nobel laureates presented the prizes to the ten IG Nobel winners who all won a now obsolete Zimbabwean ten trillion-dollar bill, available for $22 on eBay, and a "transparent box" containing items relating to "Murphy's Law" – the theme of this year's ceremony and the principle that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. On that note, some of the items in the box were missing, presenters said, and the box itself was "almost impossible to open."真正的诺贝尔奖得主亲自为十位搞笑诺贝尔奖的获奖者颁奖。每位获奖者不仅获得了一张现已不流通的津巴布韦十万亿元纸币 （在eBay上售价22美元）和一个“透明盒子”，里面装有一些与“墨菲定律”相关的物品——这是今年颁奖典礼的主题，也是“凡事只要有可能出错，就一定会出错”的原则。然而，有趣的是，据主持人透露，盒子里的部分物品竟然不翼而飞，而且盒子本身也设计得异常难以打开。