From fingernail diaries to pizza-eating lizards, this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes once again celebrated research that makes people laugh before it makes them think. The 2025 ceremony, held virtually from Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, spotlighted oddball studies from around the world that nevertheless posed real scientific questions.
Among this year’s laureates are Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal, who have been feted in the engineering design category “for analysing, from an engineering design perspective, how foul-smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe-rack.” This study was published in 2022.
Founded in 1991 by the science humour magazine ‘Annals of Improbable Research’, the Ig Nobel prizes were conceived as a playful counterweight to the more austere Nobel Prizes. While some critics once dismissed them as frivolous, the awards have grown into a respected annual tradition. Their motto — “first make people laugh, and then make them think” — underscores how even whimsical studies can shed light on important issues in psychology, biology, and beyond.
For example, this year’s literature prize was awarded to the late American physician William Bean, who spent 35 years tracking the growth of his fingernails. Dr. Bean’s unusual dedication produced a string of papers across decades, making him one of the most consistent observers of his own body in medical history. His son, Bennett Bean, accepted the award in his memory.
The psychology prize went to Marcin Zajenkowski of Poland and Gilles Gignac of Australia, who tested what happens when people, especially narcissists, are told they are intelligent. Their work revealed that such feedback temporarily boosts feelings of uniqueness, offering insight into how self-esteem and personality intertwine.
On the culinary front, the nutrition prize recognised researchers from Nigeria, Togo, Italy, and France for studying rainbow lizards that developed a taste for pizza scraps at a seaside resort. Their paper demonstrated how urbanisation influences animal diets in surprising ways. Somewhat similarly, the paediatrics prize went to Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp of the US, who found that when mothers eat garlic, the flavour seeps into breast milk and alters how nursing infants behave. Their decades-old study continues to influence research on early taste development.
Japan took home the biology prize, where Tomoki Kojima and colleagues painted zebra-like stripes on cows to see if they reduced fly bites. The striped cows indeed attracted fewer pests, extending earlier work that showed zebra patterns might be nature’s bug repellent.
The chemistry prize went to Rotem and Daniel Naftalovich and Frank Greenway, who asked whether ingesting Teflon, best known as a nonstick coating on kitchen utensils, could bulk up meals without adding calories. While not exactly a recommended diet, their work raised provocative questions about satiety and food engineering.
The peace prize recognized a more more lighthearted social experiment in which researchers from the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany showed that moderate alcohol consumption sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak a foreign language, offering potentially new meaning to the phrase “Dutch courage”.
Likewise, the work of Drs. Kumar and Mittal in India served to remind designers that even everyday nuisances merit ergonomic study. Their win was the 22nd for India. The last time the country was represented at the prizes was in 2022, when an international team from India, China, Malaysia, and the US won the mechanical engineering prize “for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools”.
In 2020, India and Pakistan had shared the peace prize “for having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other’s doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door”.
Other highlights this year included studies of bats flying under the influence of alcohol, which snagged the aviation prize, the physics of why pasta sauces sometimes form lumps.
Together, these projects reveal the enduring charm of the Ig Nobel prizes, because behind each chuckle lies a genuine curiosity about the world. Who says life can’t be funny?
Published – September 19, 2025 04:09 pm IST