The 2025 Ig Nobel ceremony, held at Boston University, continued the tradition of celebrating unorthodox curiosity. Winners included researchers who discovered that painting cows with zebra-like stripes reduces fly bites, scientists who studied whether drunken bats can still echolocate properly, and a team that perfected the physics of cooking the Italian dish cacio e pepe. All ideas that truly capture the Ig Nobel spirit of odd yet thought-provoking inquiry
Each September, around the same time that the prestigious, venerable Nobel Prize announcements come out, a celebration of the less serious side of science takes place. The Ig Nobel Prize aims to honour “achievements that first make people LAUGH then make them THINK”.
The regular Nobel Prizes for chemistry, physics, medicine, peace, literature, and economic science recognise achievements that transform knowledge in these fields. The Ig Nobel is intentionally humorous. The name of the award is a play on the word ignoble, which means “baseness, lowness, or meanness”. Marc Abrahams, the founder of the prize, explains its importance as this: ”Our prize is orthogonal to the Nobel Prize. Curiosity leads to more curiosity, and once people start asking questions, at that moment, they become scientists. They are no longer just skimming the surface of phenomena; they begin to dig deeper.” Suggesting that the prize was created simply to encourage curiosity on multiple fronts.
Though the work that the award recognizes is offbeat, it is still scientifically valid. For example, the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize in Demography was awarded to “Supercentenarian and Remarkable Age Records Exhibit Patterns Indicative of Clerical Errors and Pension Fraud,” Saul Justin Newman who found that some of the people with the longest lives lived in places with inefficient birth and death records. Some of my personal favorites are the biology prize won by Robert Klark Graham in 1991, who developed a sperm bank that only accepts donations from Olympians and Nobel laureates, and the 2021 chemistry prize awarded to Jörg Wicker, Nicolas Krauter, Bettina Derstroff, Christof Stönner, Efstratios Bourtsoukidis, Achim Edtbauer, Jochen Wulf, Thomas Klüpfel, Stefan Kramer, and Jonathan Williams, who chemically analyzed air inside movie theaters to determine whether the odors produced by an audience could indicate the amount of different aspects in a movie.
So far, only one scientist has won both the Nobel Prize and the Ig Nobel. Physicist Andre Geim won the Ig Nobel for his work using magnets to levitate frogs. He later won the Nobel Prize for his work with graphene.
The Ig Nobels remind people in the world of science that curiosity is meant to be free-spirited and based on genuine questions about our world. The award encourages all kinds of curiosity, as in every field of study imaginable, ideas thought to be ridiculous often prove to be the most revolutionary.
