Ig Nobel prizes moving to Europe due to 'unsafe' U.S.
· Toronto Sun
The tongue-in-cheek Ig Nobel awards are moving to Europe this year because the U.S. has become “unsafe” to visit, the award organizers said.
The satirical science awards hold loud, silly ceremonies that see paper airplanes thrown at the winners and have been yearly staples at universities in Massachusetts since 1991.
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Ig Nobel laureates have been coming to the U.S. from all over the world, however, the organizer said, academics from abroad have complained lately about travelling to America since President Donald Trump took office a second time.
“During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” Ig Nobel founder Marc Abrahams said in a statement Monday. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the U.S.A. this year.”
Set for Switzerland
This year, the 36th Ig Nobel awards will be held in Zurich, Switzerland on Sept. 3. The University of Zurich and ETH Domain, The Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, will host the ceremony, which lauds achievements “that first make people laugh, then make them think.”
To make the awards happen, Zurich and its institutions “rapidly moved mountains (only metaphorically — in Switzerland it is illegal to physically move mountains),” Abrahams joked.
“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.”
Silly science
It may be silly, but scientists are big fans of the Ig Nobels, with actual Nobel laureates handing out prizes — often while wearing outlandish hats.
The University of Zurich’s Milo Puhan, an epidemiologist who won a 2017 Ig Nobel for showing that the didgeridoo can alleviate snoring, said the move was a good idea. “The Ig Nobel Prize makes research visible, and does so with a wink,” he said in the statement.
Award organizers say the plan is to make Zurich their base of operations, holding ceremonies there every even-numbered year, while travelling to different European cities in every odd-numbered year. “It will be a little like the Eurovision Song Contest,” Abrahams said.
Past winners
The winners of last year’s Ig Nobels included Japanese scientists who painted zebra stripes on cows to fend off flies and a team led by the University of Freiburg’s Fritz Renner, who showed how drinking alcohol can help people speak a foreign language.
Other past winners include Andre Geim of the University of Nijmegen and the University of Bristol’s Michael Berry for levitating a frog with magnets. A 2019 prize went to a team of researchers who sought to explain why wombats have cube-shaped poo.