“The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down”*…
It’s that time of year again: the 2025 IgNobel Awards have been awarded. Jennifer Ouellette reports…
Does alcohol enhance one’s foreign language fluency? Do West African lizards have a preferred pizza topping? And can painting cows with zebra stripes help repel biting flies? These and other unusual research questions were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2025 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes… when the serious and the silly converge—for science.
Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words.
Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website…
Read on for accounts (each both amusing and fascinating) of this year’s winners: “Meet the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize winners,” @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social in @arstechnica.com.
More at the web site of Improbable Research— “research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK”– the organization behind the IgNobels.
* Adam Savage (@asavage.bsky.social)
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As we have some serious fun, we might we might spare a thought for a man who embodied the marriage of science and glee: Ron Toomer; he died on this date in 2011. Toomer began his career as an aeronautical engineer who contributed to the heat shields on NASA’s Apollo spacecraft. But in 1965, he joined Arrow Development, an amusement park ride design company, where he became a legendary creator of steel roller coasters. His first assignment was “The Run-Away Mine Train” (at Six Flags Over Texas), the first “mine train” ride, and the second steel roller coaster (after Arrow’s Matterhorn Ride at Disneyland). Toomer went on to design 93 coasters worldwide, and was especially known for his creation of the first “inversion” coasters (he built the first coasters with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, loops). In 2000, he was inducted in the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) Hall of Fame as a “Living Legend.”
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