Paris (France) (AFP) – The tongue-in-cheek Ig Nobel awards will be held in Europe for the first time this year because the United States has become “unsafe” for international prize-winners to visit, the organisers have announced. The awards, which celebrate the sillier side of science, have held raucous ceremonies that see the winners showered with paper aeroplanes at universities in Massachusetts since 1991. Like the Nobels they satirise, Ig Nobel laureates hail from all over the world.
However, international academics have reported problems travelling to the US since President Donald Trump’s second term began in early 2025. “During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” Ig Nobel founder Marc Abrahams said in a statement on Monday. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year.”
The 36th edition of the Ig Nobels will be held in the Swiss city of Zurich on September 3, the organisation said. The University of Zurich and ETH Domain will host the ceremony, which gives prizes to achievements “that first make people laugh, then make them think.” To make this possible, Zurich and its institutions “rapidly moved mountains (only metaphorically — in Switzerland it is illegal to physically move mountains),” Abrahams said. “Switzerland has nurtured many unexpected good things — Albert Einstein’s physics, the world economy, and the cuckoo clock leap to mind — and is again helping the world appreciate improbable people and ideas.”
Despite the silliness, many scientists appreciate the Ig Nobels. Real Nobel prize-winners hand out the awards at the ceremony — often wearing funny hats. Milo Puhan, an epidemiologist at the University of Zurich who won a 2017 Ig Nobel for showing that playing the didgeridoo can alleviate snoring, welcomed the move. “The Ig Nobel Prize makes research visible, and does so with a wink,” Puhan said in the statement.
The awards said that the “general plan” is to hold ceremonies in Zurich every second year. In odd-numbered years, it will move to different European cities. “It will be a little like the Eurovision Song Contest,” Abrahams said. The winners of last year’s Ig Nobels included scientists who painted zebra stripes on cows to fend off flies and others who showed how drinking alcohol can help people speak a foreign language.
© 2024 AFP
