Andre Geim stays the only scientist to have gained each an Ig Nobel prize and a Nobel Prize.
| Photo Credit: Bengt Oberger (CC BY-SA)
Recent experiences acknowledged that two Indian scientists had acquired Ig Nobel prize within the Engineering Design class in 2025. We know of the Nobel Prizes however the Ig Nobels?
As one report in Science identified, the Ig Nobel prizes are light-hearted occasions that supply a humorous satire concerning the prize. The ‘Ig’ prefix stands for a non-honourable or decrease standing and the prizes’ title is a pun on the phrase ‘ignoble’, placing a humorous distinction with the true Nobel Prizes, which advance our information in science, expertise, literature, peace, and economics.
These satirical prizes have been awarded yearly since 1991 to advertise public engagement with scientific analysis. They take intention at analysis that makes folks giggle and then makes them think. Each winner receives a single banknote of 10 trillion Zimbabwean {dollars}, which had been price 40 US cents once they had been demonetised and are now not in use. In distinction, every Nobel Prize winner receives a gold medal (engraved with the image of the prizes’ founder Alfred Nobel) and round 11 million Swedish kronor, divided amongst as much as three laureates if a prize is shared.
Each winner additionally will get to current her/his lecture at a ceremony within the Swedish Academy of Sciences in December yearly. In distinction, the Ig Nobel is offered at a ceremony in Boston, Massachusetts and every winner is allowed just one minute to current their achievements.
Ig Nobel laureates of 2025
The Ig Nobel prizes are picked by the journal Annals of Improbable Research. According to their web site, these are the 2025 Ig Nobel prize laureates: Tomoki Kojima and colleagues for experiments displaying how cows painted with zebra-like stripes had been bitten much less usually by flies (biology); Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal from Uttar Pradesh on how the expertise of a shoe rack could be affected by foul-smelling sneakers in it (engineering design or ergonomics); the medical historian and internist Prof. William Bean of Columbia University, USA, who documented how his fingernails grew (literature); Marcin Zajenkowski of Poland and Gilles Gignac of Australia for displaying that people who find themselves narcissists have their shallowness rise when informed they’re clever (psychology); researchers from Nigeria, Togo, Italy, and France for displaying how rainbow lizards purchase a style for sure sorts of pizza (vitamin); Julie Mennella and Gory Beauchamp of the USA for displaying how, when moms eat garlic, their breast-feeding infants took in additional milk (paediatrics); the staff of Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich, and Frank Greenway of the USA for displaying that Teflon, often used to coat kitchen utensils, is an effective additive to extend meals quantity and therefore satiety with out growing the calorie content material (chemistry); and for researchers from the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany for displaying how consuming average quantities of alcohol can enhance the flexibility to talk a overseas language (peace).
(Note: Prof. Bean handed away in 2020 and his son acquired the prize.)
It is fascinating to notice that to date just one scientist has gained each an Ig Nobel prize and a Nobel Prize. This is the physicist Andre Geim of Manchester University within the UK. He was awarded the Ig Nobel prize in 2000 along with Michael Berry for levitating a frog in a robust magnetic discipline utilizing its intrinsic magnetism, within the physics class. In 2010, Prof. Geim and Konstantin Novoselov had been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene”.
dbala@lvpei.org
Published – October 04, 2025 05:30 am IST
