For the first time in the Ig Nobel Prize's 35-year history, the ceremony honoring science that "first makes people laugh, and then makes them think" left the United States entirely, decamping to Zurich's Kongresshaus on Sept. 3. Roughly 1,500 attendees showed up for the 36th edition and, per tradition, pelted the stage with a blizzard of paper airplanes folded from sheets handed out at the door.
This year's Medicine Prize went to a researcher who wasn't there to catch any of them. Tokuji Unno, the late founding professor of otolaryngology at Asahikawa Medical University in Japan, was honored posthumously for a 1977 paper titled "How to Blow the Nose — An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing." Unno, who died in 2022 at 89, concluded that blowing one nostril at a time moves air more efficiently than blowing both at once, and — perhaps more reassuringly for anyone who has ever blown too hard — that vigorous nose-blowing does not appear to directly affect the ears.
He was a pioneer in research into nasal physiology and airflow.
Miki Takahara, Unno's former student, accepting the award on his behalf
Takahara, now a professor at the same university, traveled to Switzerland to collect the trophy, and organizers marked the moment by having several actual Nobel laureates in attendance blow their noses on stage in Unno's honor, according to coverage of the ceremony. The win extends Japan's remarkable streak of at least one Ig Nobel winner every year for two decades running.
A crowded field of odd science
Unno shared the spotlight with nine other prizes handed out that night. A physics award went to researchers who engineered a splash-free urinal using differential equations; a chemistry prize recognized scientists who found that proteins in cockroach milk pack roughly three times the energy of cow's milk proteins; and a biomechanics prize honored a team that devised a rigorous scientific definition of kissing, tested across species from humans to polar bears. A soil-science team was recognized for burying 1,000 identical pairs of underpants in more than two dozen countries and digging them up two months later to gauge biological activity underground, a method also cited in reporting on this year's ceremony.
Ig Nobel founder Marc Abrahams, who has run the awards since 1991 through his Annals of Improbable Research, has long insisted the prizes aren't meant as mockery — the research is real, peer-reviewed and, in Unno's case, nearly half a century old before anyone thought to give it a trophy. Judging by the reaction in Zurich, at least, the joke landed exactly as intended, one paper airplane at a time.