This move to Switzerland came after 35 years of holding the annual ceremony in the United States, due to concerns related to entry visas to the United States in light of strict immigration policies, as the organizers indicated that four of the ten winners last year chose not to travel to Boston to attend the ceremony due to these concerns.
“Over the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” said Mark Abrahams, ceremony organizer and editor of the Annals of Improbable Research. “We cannot in good conscience ask new laureates, or international journalists, to travel to the United States.”
The Ig Nobel Prizes were established in 1991 by Mark Abrahams, owner of the humorous magazine Annals of Improbable Research, as a parody of the prestigious Nobel Prizes.
The official motto of this award, which is also known as the “Nobel Prize for Ignorance,” the “Nobel Prize for Stupidity,” or the “Nobel Prize for Scientific Stupidity,” is to honor achievements that “first make people laugh, then make them think.”
The winning research this year varied between the strange and the surprising, as 10 research teams received the award that was distributed on Thursday, September 3:
· Chemistry Prize: International team (India, France, Japan, USA) – for discovering that milk proteins from newborn cockroaches contain three times more energy than cow's milk proteins.
· Medicine Prize: Tokuji Ono (Japan, posthumous) – for the study entitled “How to blow your nose: an aerodynamic study of nose blowing.”
· Biomechanics Prize: Catherine F. Talbot and her team (University of Oxford) – for reconstructing the evolutionary history of kissing, and providing a precise definition of it that includes other species of animals and excludes food transport.
· Physics Award: International team (Canada, United States, China, Saudi Arabia) – to develop a theoretical and experimental model for designing a urinal that reduces splashing.
· Technology Award: International team (China, Canada, USA, Egypt) – for using mosquito proboscis as high-precision 3D printing nozzles, in a process called “necro-printing.”
· Soil Science Prize: Franz Bender, Marcel van der Heijden, Atlant Berry, Pia Viviani (Switzerland, Netherlands, Germany) – for burying 1,000 pairs of underwear in more than 25 countries, and exhuming them two months later to study how they were decomposed by soil organisms.
· Economics Prize: International team (United States, Argentina, Australia) – for demonstrating that people from an upper class are more prone to unethical behaviour, such as snatching candy from children.
· Biology Prize: International team (Brazil, Australia) – to study the effect of pressure on different parts of the body of venomous snakes to see which ones increase the likelihood of a bite.
· Olfaction Award: International team (Poland, Germany, Sweden) – collecting evidence that infants smell nice to their parents, while teenagers do not.
· Peace Prize: International Team (USA, Argentina, Australia) – for documenting that we value friends who act cruelly towards people we don't like.
It is noteworthy that the previous 35 editions of the satirical award ceremony were held at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University, but Abrahams said that the ceremony will now alternate between Zurich and other European cities, with the 2027 edition being held in Antwerp, Belgium, with no immediate plans to return to the United States.
Milo Bohan, an epidemiologist at the University of Zurich who won the Ig Nobel Prize in 2017 for research showing that playing the didgeridoo can reduce snoring and the severity of sleep apnea, welcomed the ceremony's move to his city. "The Ig Nobel Prize makes research visible and does so with a touch of humor," he told The Associated Press.
The award states that it has no connection to the Nobel Prize, which will be announced in early October.
