Auke-Florian Hiemstra
Marc Abrahams, Found of the Ig Nobel prizes
Since 1991, Marc Abrahams, together with his colleagues, has been awarding the Ig Nobel Prizes to research that first makes people laugh and then think. In this interview, he explains why unusual questions interest him more than final answers, why even apparently crazy research should be taken seriously – and what teachers can learn from it.
Photo: Auke-Florian Hiemstra
About the Ig Nobel Prizes
One the website www.improbable.com, the Ig Nobel Prizes are introduced as follows: “The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements so surprising that they make people LAUGH, then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.” The website says further: “The prizes — for achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK — are handed out by genuine, bemused Nobel laureates in a gala event held every year at Harvard University or MIT or Boston University (but online only, during the pandemic years 2020-2023), and livecast. In 2026 the ceremony moved to Europe.“
Among this year’s Ig Nobel winners are researchers who stepped on venomous snakes to find out when they bite, a team that developed a splash-free urinal, and another that used dead mosquito proboscises as nozzles for 3D printing. Which of these projects best shows what “first laugh, then think” means?
Marc Abrahams: Actually, all of them. After 35 years of doing the Ig Nobel Prizes, I know that behind almost every prize-winning piece of research there is a much more interesting and complicated story than you would ever guess at first. Once you look more closely, new questions appear that you never expected. That is something I look forward to every year.
I usually don’t meet the winners until the evening of the ceremony. Only afterwards do we really start to learn in detail what they did, who they are, and what questions led them to the research in the first place. And almost every time, the story turns out to be more surprising than it seemed at first.
At the 2026 ceremony in Zurich, Nobel laureates Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, Michel Mayor and Tim Hunt demonstrate the findings that Ig Nobel Medicine Prize winner Tokuji Unno documented in his study called “How to Blow the Nose — An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing”.
Photo: Petra Wolfensberger. Source: www.improbable.com
Reading some of your earlier interviews, I noticed that you often ask the interviewer questions yourself. Are you more interested in questions than in answers?
Marc Abrahams: Yes. That really is the heart of it – it is the heart of the Ig Nobel Prizes. Our greatest hope has always been that when people learn about an Ig Nobel Prize winner, they suddenly come across a question they did not care about at all before – and now they want to know more.
Then their life has changed a little bit. What they do with that new curiosity is completely up to them. But for me, that moment is the important thing: a question that meant nothing to you a moment ago suddenly matters.
Is the moment when you discover a good question perhaps even more important than the moment when you find the answer?
Marc Abrahams: Does anybody ever really find the answer?
The more you understand about a subject, the more you usually realise how little you actually know. That is what keeps science interesting – and really, work and life too. It is not like going to a film for 90 minutes and walking out afterwards with the feeling that you understand everything. It is the opposite. The more you learn, the more you realise that the whole thing is even more interesting and more mysterious than you thought. More and more questions appear.
Are there such things as silly scientific questions? Or can a question that sounds absurd at first lead to good science?
Marc Abrahams: Of course you can ask a question that is just silly and nothing more. But almost any question that sounds crazy can very quickly lead you in an interesting – and perhaps even important – direction.
In a way, poets do something very similar. They take a word or an idea and look at other meanings and unusual connections it might have. Once you get into the habit of really looking at something you notice for a moment and asking why it is the way it is, new questions almost appear by themselves. And some of them you really want to answer.
How did you come up with the idea of starting the Ig Nobel Prizes in 1991?
Marc Abrahams: At the time I had rather unexpectedly become the editor of a science magazine. I had sent the magazine a few things I had written, just to see whether they might publish something of mine. Instead, the publisher called me and asked whether I would become the editor.
Through the magazine I met lots of scientists, inventors and other people who had done very unusual things. And I kept thinking: most people are never going to hear about these people. That seems a shame.
So I had an idea: we could organise an event and give prizes to some of them. The first ceremony took place at MIT in 1991. The hall was full, reporters came from around the world, and four Nobel laureates helped hand out the prizes. We were very lucky – and because it worked, we did it again the next year.
Is there an Ig Nobel story that you particularly enjoy telling?
Marc Abrahams: One I really like is about a team of scientists in Australia. They had studied the forces needed to drag sheep across different surfaces.
When I phoned one of the scientists to offer the team an Ig Nobel Prize, it turned out that he knew the prizes very well and was a fan of them. But as we talked, it became clear that this phone call was probably the first moment when he and his colleagues realised that what they had done might seem funny to other people.
That happens surprisingly often. The winners think the other winners’ research is funny – but not their own.
And the same thing is true in everyday life. Whatever you do every day becomes completely normal to you very quickly. To somebody outside that world, it can look pretty crazy. So maybe it is useful every now and then to remember how strange your own work might look from the outside. Then you may start asking questions again.
On 14 November, you will be speaking to teachers at the STEM Teacher Day in Luxembourg. What would you like them to take away from your talk?
Marc Abrahams: The Ig Nobel Prizes – and really everything else in the universe – can be very simple tools for helping students become curious about things.
You can tell them that they should be curious. Or you can show them something that makes them curious and makes them want to know more. I think the second way is much more enjoyable and much more effective.
When I was a student, I worked as a teaching assistant. I especially enjoyed working with students who were frightened of certain subjects. I tried to find different ways into those subjects, so that the fear or uncertainty could turn into interest. In a way, I am still doing that.
STEM Teacher Day in Luxemburg
The STEM Teacher Day on 14th November 2026 at Lycée is a national professional development event organised by SCRIPT and IFEN for secondary school teachers of STEM subjects in Luxembourg. It focuses on the exchange of teaching practices, the promotion of interdisciplinarity between STEM subjects, and networking with national and international stakeholders in education. Through talks, practical workshops and a science fair, participants will gain fresh inspiration for real-world, cross-curricular teaching. Marc Abrahams will give one of the keynote talks at this event. The event also provides a space for collegial exchange and the development of new partnerships. The aim is to highlight innovative ideas and to work together to further develop STEM education. More info and registration on the IFEN website.
After 35 years of Ig Nobel Prizes, do you ever worry that you will eventually run out of genuinely surprising stories?
Marc Abrahams: No. We don’t really have to look very hard – people send us suggestions every day.
We give only ten prizes each year. At the same time, there are billions of people in the world, and almost all of them spend their lives doing things that could be interesting to somebody else. A lot of it gets documented somewhere – in scientific papers, reports or in other ways.
We are definitely not going to run out of surprising questions and results.
Interview: Hannes Schlender (scienceRELATIONS)
Editor: Michèle Weber (FNR)
The 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes
At the 36th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in Zurich on 3 September 2026, ten prizes were awarded, as every year:
- Biomechanics: Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot and Stuart West, for developing a more precise scientific definition of kissing – based on observations of ants, birds, polar bears and humans.
- Economics: Paul Piff and colleagues, for evidence that people from higher social classes are more likely to behave unethically – for example, by taking sweets that were meant for children.
- Chemistry: Sanchari Banerjee and colleagues, for discovering that certain milk-protein crystals produced by a live-bearing cockroach contain about three times as much energy as cow’s-milk proteins.
- Medicine: Tokuji Unno, posthumously, for an aerodynamic study of how to blow your nose.
- Biology: João Miguel Alves-Nunes and colleagues, for repeatedly and carefully stepping on different parts of venomous snakes to find out when they bite.
- Physics: Randy Hurd and colleagues, for theoretical and experimental work aimed at developing a splash-free urinal.
- Technology: Justin Puma and colleagues, for using mosquito proboscises as high-resolution nozzles for 3D printing – a technique they call “necroprinting”.
- Smell research: Ilona Croy and colleagues, for studying why parents rate the body odour of their babies as much more pleasant than that of their teenagers.
- Peace: Jaimie Arona Krems and colleagues, for finding that we may appreciate friends who treat people badly when those are people we ourselves dislike.
- Soil science: Franz Bender and colleagues, for burying 1,000 identical pairs of cotton underwear in more than 25 countries and digging them up two months later to investigate soil health.
Ig Nobel Prizes held in Zurich for the first time
After 35 years in the Boston area of the United States, the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony was held in Europe for the first time in 2026. It was hosted jointly by the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich.
Marc Abrahams says the move became necessary after several winners decided not to travel to the United States in 2025 because they did not feel comfortable or safe doing so. For 2026, it was clear that if most of the winners were to attend the ceremony in person, it would have to take place outside the United States.
Zurich is now planned to host the ceremony in even-numbered years. In odd-numbered years, it is intended to move to a different European country – Antwerp in Belgium in 2027. Abrahams jokingly compares the idea to the Eurovision Song Contest.
One unexpected side effect especially pleases him: people from the participating countries meet through the ceremony, and new scientific and artistic contacts and collaborations are already beginning to emerge.
