Please join us on Friday, November 14, 2023, for this year’s Science Friday day-after-Thanksgiving Ig Nobel Prize special broadcast. To many people, the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony — each year honoring ten things that make people LAUGH then THINK — is an annual radio event, surprising stuff and people that pour out of the radio […]
Category: Ig Nobel
News about the Ig Nobel Prizes — honoring achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.
“Why geology leaves a bad taste in your mouth”
Joannasaurus gives firsthand testimony about why geologists lick rocks, in this one-minute video: The 2023 Ig Nobel Chemistry & Geology Prize was awarded to Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks. Zalasiewicz will explain his explanation as part of the Ig Nobel show at Imperial College London on Saturday, November […]
The special Ig Nobel issue of the magazine
The special Ig Nobel issue of the magazine (volume 29, number 6) has just gone out to subscribers. It’s got copious details about the 2023 prize winners and the ceremony. And more. Lotsa stuff that makes people LAUGH, then THINK. The magazine is in PDF format. You can buy a copy, or buy a subscription.
The Nostril-Hair / Air-Pollution Campaign
The awarding of the 2023 Ig Nobel Medicine prize for research on nostril hairs revives happy memories of a publicity campaign mounted a decade earlier by the organization Clean Air Asia. That campaign introduced itself by saying: The campaign seeks to highlight, humorously, that urban populations should not adapt to worsening air quality but actually […]
Ig Nobel Prize Winner Boris Johnson’s Life & Death Influence: New Info
Historians are coming to further appreciate the life-and-death influence of former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson — influence that earned Johnson a share of the 2020 Ig Nobel Medical Education Prize. BBC News reports (on October 31, 2023) some new, pertinent information: Boris Johnson agreed with some Tory MPs who thought Covid was “nature’s way […]
Demonstration: How to make bland food taste salty
Electrified chopsticks, soup bowls, and other eating implements can make bland food taste much saltier — much tastier. The technology was honored with the 2023 Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize. The prize, awarded to Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for their experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food. […]
Interview with the Ig Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the Stanford Toilet
Dr. Seung-min Park was awarded the 2023 Ig Nobel Public Health Prize for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies — including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal-print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link — to monitor and […]
New, Added Acclaim for the Dunning-Kruger Effect
The University of Michigan proudly announces the good news about Ig Nobel Prize winners David Dunning [pictured here] and Justin Kruger: Announcement of the New (2023) Prize Dave Dunning Wins the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) Scientific Impact Award Dr. David Dunning has won the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) Scientific Impact Award. According […]
Ig Nobel Show at Imperial College London
We invite you to join us at the Ig Nobel Show at Imperial College London, UK, on Saturday November 18, 2023. This resumes the long series of annual events that was interrupted by the pandemic. Marc Abrahams and several Ig Nobel Prize winners will talk about the prizes, and answer questions. Featuring: 2023 Literature Prize winner Akira O’Connor (the sensations […]
Ig Nobel Face-to-Face Event at the MIT Museum
We invite you to join us at a new event — Ig Nobel Face-to-Face. This is a companion to the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony that happened in September. Most of the new Ig Nobel Prize winners will be there. They will ask each other questions about their work. And you will get a chance to […]