September 26, 2025
Sometimes people think you need to make up your material to laugh, but week after week, we prove this is not the case. I can twirl through the Internet and in 30 minutes find myself eliminating ideas, not find myself short of them. It is a plain fact that people can be funny, and with several billion of us ambling about the planet every day, a fair number are going to do zany things.
Monty Python was zany. The Marx Brothers were zany. I love zany. Which brings me today to the Ig Nobel Prizes.
I am forced to assure our beloved readers that I’m not making any of this up. First, I’m not that creative and second, I don’t have to…this is a real thing.
The Ig Nobel Prizes are organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research (OK, how fun is that?). The ceremony is co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students and the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association. And what qualifies?
Every Ig Nobel Prize winner has done something that first makes people LAUGH, then makes them THINK.
Ten new Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded each year, beginning in 1991. The winners are feted at the annual Ig Nobel Awards Ceremony, just held in Boston a couple of weeks ago. I have promised my wife we are going next year, I can be a kind of cub reporter at the event.
“Und zo Herr Harzinnogginer, I object to your footnote on page 5,345! Herr Doktor Genflingernoting did not count dust mites!” (said with some heat)
One of the zany things about the Ig’s is that the winners are given their Ig Prizes by actual winners of Nobel Prizes. As here:
Ig Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Elena Bodnar demonstrates her invention (a brassiere that can quickly convert into a pair of protective face masks) assisted by Nobel laureates Wolfgang Ketterle (left), Orhan Pamuk, and Paul Krugman (right) at the 2009 Ig Nobel Ceremony.
Now we announce the actual 2025 winners below, and some winners from 2023-2024. If you read these and find yourself wondering how many winners wind up leading Federal Government research projects, well, you’d be right on the beam. As a matter of fact, right here, Working Profit makes Breaking News by perhaps identifying the sources of those Federal research grants. It all rhymes and perhaps Rylie can get me five minutes on Fox News with this.
Here we go!
LITERATURE PRIZE [USA]
The late Dr. William B. Bean, for persistently recording and analyzing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years.
PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, AUSTRALIA, CANADA]
Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles Gignac, for investigating what happens when you tell narcissists — or anyone else — that they are intelligent.
NUTRITION PRIZE [NIGERIA, TOGO, ITALY, FRANCE]
Daniele Dendi, Gabriel H. Segniagbeto, Roger Meek, and Luca Luiselli, for studying the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza.
I emphasize again, I’m not making this stuff up. The actual research paper, just as an example:“Opportunistic Foraging Strategy of Rainbow Lizards at a Seaside Resort in Togo,” Daniele Dendi, Gabriel H. Segniagbeto, Roger Meek, and Luca Luiselli, African Journal of Ecology, vol. 61, no. 1, 2023, pp. 226-227. You know, in case the subject interests you.
PEDIATRICS PRIZE [USA]
Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp, for studying what a nursing baby experiences when the baby’s mother eats garlic.
BIOLOGY PRIZE [JAPAN]
Tomoki Kojima, Kazato Oishi, Yasushi Matsubara, Yuki Uchiyama, Yoshihiko Fukushima, Naoto Aoki, Say Sato, Tatsuaki Masuda, Junichi Ueda, Hiroyuki Hirooka, and Katsutoshi Kino, for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid being bitten by flies. Controlled experiment:
CHEMISTRY PRIZE [USA, ISRAEL]
Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich, and Frank Greenway, for experiments to test whether eating Teflon [a form of plastic more formally called “polytetrafluoroethylene”] is a good way to increase food volume and hence satiety without increasing calorie content.
PEACE PRIZE [THE NETHERLANDS, UK, GERMANY]
Fritz Renner, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field, and Jessica Werthmann, for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language.
ENGINEERING DESIGN PRIZE [INDIA]
Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal, for analyzing, from an engineering design perspective, how foul-smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe-rack.
AVIATION PRIZE [COLOMBIA, ISRAEL ARGENTINA, GERMANY, UK, ITALY, USA, PORTUGAL, SPAIN]
Francisco Sánchez, Mariana Melcón, Carmi Korine, and Berry Pinshow, for studying whether ingesting alcohol can impair bats’ ability to fly and also their ability to echolocate.
PHYSICS PRIZE [ITALY, SPAIN, GERMANY, AUSTRIA]
Giacomo Bartolucci, Daniel Maria Busiello, Matteo Ciarchi, Alberto Corticelli, Ivan Di Terlizzi, Fabrizio Olmeda, Davide Revignas, and Vincenzo Maria Schimmenti, for discoveries about the physics of pasta sauce, especially the phase transition that can lead to clumping, which can be a cause of unpleasantness.
REFERENCE: “Phase Behavior of Cacio and Pepe Sauce,” Giacomo Bartolucci, Daniel Maria Busiello, Matteo Ciarchi, Alberto Corticelli, Ivan Di Terlizzi, Fabrizio Olmeda, Davide Revignas, and Vincenzo Maria Schimmenti, Physics of Fluids, vol. 37, 2025, article 044122.
PEACE PRIZE [USA]
B.F. Skinner, for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles.
CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK]
Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.
That one just cracked me up.
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA]
Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.
ANATOMY PRIZE [FRANCE, CHILE]
Marjolaine Willems, Quentin Hennocq, Sara Tunon de Lara, Nicolas Kogane, Vincent Fleury, Romy Rayssiguier, Juan José Cortés Santander, Roberto Requena, Julien Stirnemann, and Roman Hossein Khonsari, for studying whether the hair on the heads of most people in the northern hemisphere swirls in the same direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise?) as hair on the heads of most people in the southern hemisphere.
MEDICINE PRIZE [SWITZERLAND, GERMANY, BELGIUM]
Lieven A. Schenk, Tahmine Fadai, and Christian Büchel, for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side-effects.
PHYSICS PRIZE [USA]
James C. Liao, for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.
CHEMISTRY PRIZE [THE NETHERLANDS, FRANCE]
Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen, for using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.
COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA]
María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward. That has a Monty Python sketch written all over it. I’m thinking they could combine it with their piece on The Ministry of Silly Walks. Imagine?
EDUCATION PRIZE [HONG KONG, CHINA, CANADA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN]
Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.
PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA]
Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.
I’m wondering if the Goodyear Blimp people paid for that one, see how they could increase viewership by seeding upward-looking-people in the crowd?
APPLIED CARDIOLOGY PRIZE [CZECH REPUBLIC, THE NETHERLANDS, UK, SWEDEN, ARUBA]
Eliska Prochazkova, Elio Sjak-Shie, Friederike Behrens, Daniel Lindh, and Mariska Kret, for seeking and finding evidence that when new romantic partners meet for the first time, and feel attracted to each other, their heart rates synchronize. How human and tender is that?
So if you want more, here are three sites that can help, including all of the winners ever.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/09/meet-the-2025-ig-nobel-prize-winners
Thoughts, questions, or reflections? I’d love to hear them. You can reach me anytime at anthony@workingprofit.com
