"The US is no longer a pleasant country”
Funny Ig Nobel Prize leaves the United States
Winners re-enact their research during the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in 2024. Photo: Screenshot of a YouTube video
A glass of alcohol helps when speaking a foreign language, according to a study conducted at Maastricht University, which was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize last year.
The Ig Nobel Prizes honour research projects that first make you smile and then make you think. Dutch researchers often win these prizes. One of the Dutch winners investigated how many bacteria are on banknotes, for example.
Visas
The Dutch biologist Kees Moeliker won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2003 for an article on necrophilia among ducks. He is now involved in the organisation committee for the award. "The ceremony is only fun if the winners attend," Moeliker told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. "Last year, four of the ten winners weren't there. The US is no longer a fun country." The Trump administration has launched an attack on academic freedom, and anyone who criticises the administration on social media risks being denied a visa.
As a result, this year's festivities will take place in Zurich on 3 September. Another gathering will be held in Boston three weeks later, according to their website.
Appreciation
The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded in the run-up to the Nobel Prize. They are highly regarded in academia. After all, Nobel Prize winners are always involved in the award ceremony.
One of the winners of the Ig Nobel Prizes later won the “real” Nobel Prize. In 2000, the Dutch-turned-British physicist Andre Geim received an Ig Nobel Prize for making a frog float in a magnetic field. Ten years later, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics – not for that floating frog, but for inventing graphene, a material about 200 times stronger than steel but also exceptionally lightweight, flexible, and transparent.
The Ig Nobel Prize award ceremony is always a blast, with the audience throwing paper aeroplanes at the stage and the hosts performing short plays. The winners all get onstage and give short speeches (that is, if they are not interrupted by the eternally eight-year-old Miss Sweetie Poo, who's always bored).
Miss Sweetie Poo is expected to make an appearance in Zurich as well. One can also expect jokes about cuckoo clocks and Swiss cheese.
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