Research on beards, wads of gum wins 2021 Ig Nobel prizes

Beards aren’t just cool and trendy — they might also be an evolutionary development to help protect a man’s delicate facial bones from a punch to the face.

That’s the conclusion of a trio of scientists from the University of Utah who are among the winners of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes, the Nobel Prize spoofs that honor — or maybe dishonor, depending on your point of view — strange scientific discoveries.

The winners of the 31st annual Ig Nobels announced Thursday included researchers who figured out how to better control cockroaches on U.S. Navy submarines, animal scientists who looked at whether it’s safer to transport an airborne rhinoceros upside-down and a team that figured out just how disgusting that discarded gum stuck to your shoe is.

For the second year in a row, the ceremony was a roughly 90-minute prerecorded digital event because of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, said Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research magazine, the event’s primary sponsor.

While disappointing in many ways because half the fun of a live ceremony is the rowdy audience participation, the ceremony retained many in-person traditions. Those included real Nobel laureates announcing the prizes, and the world premiere of a mini opera called “A Bridge Between People,” about children who literally build tiny suspension bridges to join two angry adults.

No faces were punched for the beard study published in the scientific journal Integrative Organismal Biology.