The 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes celebration will take further flight in a flurry of paper airplanes at the Miraikan science Museum in Tokyo, Japan, on Sunday, November 17, 2024. This will be an Ig Nobel Face-to-Face event, a counterpart to the Face-to-Face event that happened at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA two days after the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. The officially announcement says [here auto-translated from Japanese to English:
The traditional “paper airplane throwing” event will also be held with participants. The official Ig Nobel Prize event will be held on November 17th.
Miraikan, the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, will hold the official Ig Nobel Prize event, ” Ig Nobel Face-to-Face 2024 in JAPAN ,” on Sunday , November 17 , 2024. This year’s Ig Nobel Prize winner Takebe Takanori and Nobel Prize winner Kajita Takaaki will be speaking to talk about their prize-winning research, as well as what inspired them to become researchers, the appeal of research, and their passion for science. To open the event, speakers and participants will participate in the traditional “paper airplane throwing” event at Ig Nobel Prize events.
[The photo here was taken at last year’s (2023) Face-to-Face event at Miraikan.]
The Ig Nobel Prize is awarded annually to about 10 groups or individuals who have conducted research that makes people laugh and think . This year marks the 34th anniversary of the award, and as Japanese researchers have been selected for the 18th consecutive year, the award has become well known in Japan. ” Ig Nobel Face-to-Face ” is an event that began in the United States last year, and this event is its Japanese version. The event is held with the aim of conveying “science that begins with simple questions” and sharing the fun and depth of science and technology.
The speakers will include Takanori Takebe of Osaka University and Tokyo Medical and Dental University, who won this year’s Ig Nobel Prize for “research that discovered the ability of many mammals to breathe from their anus, ” Yoshiaki Miyashita of Meiji University , who won last year’s prize for “experiments to change taste with electrical stimulation,” Gen Matsuzaki, who will win the prize in 2022 for “research into finger use in rotating cylindrical knobs,” and Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo, who won the original Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015. Takanori Takebe is the head of the research project “Human Organoid” in the research area attached to Miraikan , and Takaaki Kajita is the general supervisor of the permanent exhibition on the theme of “Space and Elementary Particles,” which is scheduled to be opened to the public in spring 2025. These two researchers who are closely involved with Miraikan will be participating.