This year’s Ig Nobel Prize winners were announced the other day. It’s like the Nobel Prize for the WEIRDEST and DUMBEST insights science offered us in 2025. Here are this year’s winners . . .
1. This year’s Literature Prize was awarded posthumously to a man “for persistently recording and analyzing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years.” (He was later found SCRATCHED TO DEATH. Kidding! Oh come on, it’s a Monday.)
2. The Nutrition Prize was awarded to researchers who determined rainbow lizards prefer “four-cheese” to other varieties of pizza. (Even pineapple pizza.)
3. The Pediatrics Prize went to a team who looked into what a “nursing infant” experiences when their mother eats garlic.
4. The Biology Prize went to a study that determined “cows painted with zebra-like stripes were 50% less likely to be bitten by flies.”
5. The Chemistry Prize went to experiments analyzing “whether eating Teflon would be an effective way to increase food volume without extra calories.” (???)
6. The “Ig Nobel Peace Prize” was given to a study that found that “drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language.”
7. The Engineering Design Prize went to a team who researched “how foul-smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe-rack.”
8. The Aviation Prize went to research on “how alcohol ingestion affects the ability of bats to fly and echolocate.” (If you looked at that and saw “chocolate” you’re not alone. But it’s “seeing” through sound echoes.)
9. The Psychology Prize went to a team who analyzed how receiving high IQ scores relates to “temporary state narcissism.”
10. The Ig Nobel Prize for Physics was given to scientists who looked into the properties of pasta sauce, “especially the phase transition that leads to clumping, which can be a cause of unpleasantness.”
(You can find footage of the ceremony, here.)
(Improbable / UPI)
