Every September, a few weeks before the Nobel Prizes are announced, a rowdier ceremony hands out awards for research that, in its own words, first makes people laugh and then makes them think. They are the Ig Nobel Prizes, and this year’s are awarded on September 3.
The prizes are real, and so is the science. According to the organizers, past winners have tackled questions both useful and deeply strange. One team analyzed the acoustics of cat purrs, chirps, and trills. A geologist won for explaining why so many scientists like to lick rocks. Another group showed that people speak a foreign language a little better after a drink. An engineering prize went to the inventors of a shoe rack designed to defeat foot odor.
The ceremony, run by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, is gloriously absurd. Genuine Nobel laureates hand out the awards. Winners get 60 seconds to speak before an eight-year-old girl begins interrupting with “please stop.” The trophies are homemade, and the cash prize is a now-worthless ten-trillion-dollar bill from Zimbabwe.
After 35 years at Harvard and MIT, according to the organizers, the ceremony is moving abroad for the first time, to Zurich, Switzerland. The winners will be announced, as always, to a hall pelted with paper airplanes — proof, the founders like to say, that curiosity and silliness make fine laboratory partners.
Briefs and quick reads selected and edited by The Smart Reader’s editorial team.
