For 35 years, the Ig Nobel Prizes — the beloved satirical awards that celebrate delightfully odd, creative scientific work — have called the United States their home. This year, however, a shift driven by global travel and visa barriers brought the iconic ceremony to European soil for the first time, with the 2024 event kicking off last Thursday in Zurich, Switzerland.
Hosted by *Annals of Improbable Research*, the digital magazine that founded the awards, the location change came after organizers cited growing concerns that international attendees would face barriers securing U.S. travel visas, making attendance risky and unfeasible for many guests. “During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” Marc Abrahams, the ceremony’s long-time master of ceremonies and editor of *Annals of Improbable Research*, told the Associated Press in a March interview.
The tradition of celebrating unconventional scientific ingenuity remained fully intact at the new Zurich venue, where ten research teams took home the prize, each receiving a custom-designed trophy blending the shape of a mushroom and a human foot. This year’s honorees spanned wildly unexpected areas of inquiry: a team of researchers from the University of Oxford and Florida Institute of Technology reconstructed the evolutionary history of kissing, while another project explored the physics of nose-blowing, honoring the late Dr. Tokuji Unno for his work. Other winning projects include an analysis of cockroach milk’s properties, and a massive global experiment that saw 1,000 pairs of underwear buried across more than 25 countries to study how soil organisms drive decomposition.
True to long-standing ceremony tradition, the event opened with audience members folding paper airplanes and throwing them toward the stage — a whimsical ritual that has become a hallmark of the Ig Nobel experience. Looking ahead, organizers have mapped out a rotating future for the awards: future ceremonies will alternate between Zurich and other European cities, with the 2027 event already scheduled to take place in Antwerp, Belgium. While the awards spent decades hosted at top U.S. academic institutions including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University, there are no immediate plans to return the ceremony to U.S. soil.
Notably, the satirical Ig Nobel Prizes are entirely independent of the prestigious Nobel Prizes, which are scheduled to have their annual winner announcements in early October. This year’s coverage is a contribution from the Associated Press, with science and health reporting supported by the AP Fund for Journalism and private philanthropic foundations, with AP maintaining full editorial control over all content.