Research of upside-down rhino wins Ig Nobel Prize 2021

This year's Ig Nobel Prize has been awarded to an experiment of a rhinoceros that hung upside-down to see what effect it had on animals.

Organised by the Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobels celebrate science. From psychology to physics, every year ten prizes are distributed under it to legitimate research.

The prize of Ig Nobel prize 2021 includes a $10 trillion bill from Zimbabwe along with a PDF document that is assembled and printed to make a three-dimensional gear that resembles a picture of human teeth.

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The American scientists who won this year's prizewere from Cornell University.

They had suspended a rhinoceros upside-down for 10 minutes in Namibia. They wanted to check if the health of animals might be compromised when slung by their legs beneath a helicopter.

Wildlife veterinarian Robin Radcliffe used thistechnique as it has been increasingly used in African conservation work. It helps in shifting rhinos to areas of fragmented habitat.

Another group of researchers who won the prize in a different category said in a statement "Because facial hair is one of the most sexually dimorphic features of humans and is often perceived as an indicator of masculinity and social dominance, human facial hair has been suggested to play a role in male contest competition."

"We hypothesised that beards protect the skin and bones of the face when human males fight by absorbing and dispersing the energy of a blunt impact," they wrote in the journal of Integrative Organismal Biology.

From bacteria in chewing gum stuck to pavements to controlling cockroaches on submarines, the prizes make people laugh and then think. However, they are not yet as famous as the ''real'' Nobel Prizes.

An alligator in snaps and research on testicles had the Nobel prize in the last two years.