Research and other stuff that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
TODAY, Thursday, Sept 3, at 7 pm (CEST): The 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Ten new prizes will be awarded for things that make people LAUGH, then THINK. The webcast will be available here and on our Youtube channel: The 2026 ceremony will be also webcast in a separate stream in Japanese (thanks to NIKONIKO/Dwango).
Almost all scientific discoveries come — directly or indirectly — from things that people at first thought to be strange, weird, crazy, stupid, and/or just plain wrong. This essay looks at a few of the zillions of examples: “Oddball Science: Why Studies of Unusual Evolutionary Phenomena Are Crucial,” Patricia L.R. Brennan, Duncan J. Irschick, Norman […]
Sometimes a citation can sound like a metaphor: “Asymptotic study of the blowhard problem for the supersonic flow of a gas past sharp slender bodies,” A.M. Antonov, and Yu A. Belov, USSR Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Physics, vol. 16, no. 6, 1976, pp. 227-232.
Yes, there are card games that make people LAUGH, and yes, there are card games that make people THINK. Now, new to the world, there is an official card game based on the Ig Nobel Prizes, which are all about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK. Ig Nobel: Improbable Research, The Game is the […]