For 35 years, the Ig Nobel Prizes — the satirical counterpart to the Nobels, honoring research that "first makes people laugh, then makes them think" — had never left the United States. That changed on September 3, when roughly 1,500 people packed the Kongresshaus in Zurich for the first Ig Nobel ceremony held outside American soil, an in-person revival after pandemic-era virtual shows.
The move to Switzerland didn't dampen the tradition of real Nobel laureates handing out the awards, or of the audience pelting the stage with paper airplanes throughout. This year's hosts included economics laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee alongside physics and medicine winners Michel Mayor and Tim Hunt, according to CNN.
Cockroach Milk and Splash-Free Urinals
This year's chemistry prize went to Leonard Chavas and Subramanian Ramaswamy for measuring how much energy is packed into the milk proteins of viviparous cockroaches, finding roughly three times the density of cow's milk. The physics prize honored engineers who worked out the geometry of a splash-free urinal, while the medicine award recognized a formal aerodynamic study of nose-blowing. A biology prize went to João Miguel Alves-Nunes and colleagues for gently stepping on venomous snakes, repeatedly, to learn what provokes a bite — and a biomechanics prize went to a University of Oxford team, including Matilda Brindle, for research arguing that kissing behavior extends deep into humanity's evolutionary past.
Organizers at Improbable Research, the group behind the prizes, said the Zurich venue reflects growing international interest in the awards, whose roughly 10 categories each year draw on peer-reviewed studies from around the world rather than parody science. A second, smaller ceremony is scheduled for Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 24, keeping one foot in the prize's original home even as its main stage has, for now, moved to Europe.
As always, none of the honorees turned down the award. Ig Nobel winners have historically embraced the prize as a badge of honor precisely because the underlying research is real, however odd it sounds out of context.
