| ▲ | IG Nobel Prize Winners 2025(improbable.com) |
| 135 points by JeremyTheo 10 hours ago | 39 comments |
| |
|
| ▲ | JeremyTheo 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The cacio e pepe paper posted here a couple of months ago won it in the category of physics: https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pof/article/37/4/044122/3345324/Pha... |
| |
| ▲ | fouronnes3 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | I cooked cacio e pepe a few times over the past few months specifically because I saw it on HN there! It's delicious. Try it! |
|
|
| ▲ | erk__ 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The 35th First Annual Ig Nobel Ceremony is also up on YouTube and is worth a watch as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1cP4xKd_L4 |
|
| ▲ | shireboy 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ig Nobel has been around a while. I wonder if there is an opportunity for them to add a feature whereby they (and donors) could _sponsor_ research in areas that would be considered candidates. Research that would otherwise be too trivial or arcane to be funded. |
|
| ▲ | ProllyInfamous 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| From yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45296112 (for /u/DanG to merge) |
|
| ▲ | timthorn 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you're in the London area at the end of October, the Royal Institution is hosting a special event where "Ig Nobel Prize winners will gather on stage to ask each other questions about their work" https://www.rigb.org/whats-on/ig-nobels-face-face |
| |
| ▲ | huflungdung 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > bonjour ca va? > > me not speaking a word of french > > consumes alcohol > > ca va bien merci et tu? | | |
|
|
| ▲ | cs702 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The winner for Psychology made me think, for a moment, about HN: "Telling people they are intelligent correlates with the feeling of narcissistic uniqueness: The influence of IQ feedback on temporary state narcissism," by Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles E. Gignac. Link to paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962... . The entire list is hilarious, and also makes you think. Go read the whole thing! |
| |
| ▲ | Esophagus4 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Oh boy… this is going to be a tough pill for me to swallow… | | |
| ▲ | firtoz 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That's absolutely right! | | |
| ▲ | j_bum 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don’t imagine you meant to, but this triggers my LLM sense because of the way Claude Sonnet 4 responds to any critique. | | |
| ▲ | cubefox 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Gemini thinking: The user is confused and mistaken Gemini reply: That's an interesting and insightful question! |
|
| |
| ▲ | readthenotes1 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In your case, it's because you actually are smart | | |
| |
| ▲ | amelius 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Go read the whole thing! No, if you're looking for a cure go read something about, say, quantum physics instead. | | |
|
|
| ▲ | usrnm 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Fritz Renner, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field, and Jessica Werthmann, for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language. I thought it was common knowledge? |
| |
| ▲ | pointlessone an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Does this count as evidence for Ballmer Peak? | |
| ▲ | magneticnorth 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Lots of science is "common knowledge"! This is one of those things that I'm glad to see confirmed in a study. | |
| ▲ | kijin 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But now you can put it on wikipedia and cite a proper double-blinded study! | |
| ▲ | RickJWagner 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Of course! It also makes you wittier, taller, and better looking. Everybody knows that. | | |
|
|
| ▲ | the_af 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Some are funny, but not ridiculous. For example, > for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid being bitten by flies. This isn't absurd. It is currently thought that the stripes are NOT for camouflage, since simulated predator vision (such as lions) cannot resolve them. It is believed that one reason for the stripes could be to act as a deterrent against flies (how exactly, not sure). In this sense, testing whether it works on cows isn't absurd! |
| |
| ▲ | more_corn an hour ago | parent [-] | | The great thing about this award is that it’s often real and beneficial science. The study debunking blue zones won, but it was some of the best science I’ve ever seen. (Removing false knowledge is more important than adding new knowledge) Turns out the Mediterranean diet doesn’t help you live to a hundred, there was just a lot of pension fraud in Italy. Turns out best predictor of Japanese centenarians is if the local records hall was destroyed in World War Two (because the records were replaced by non native speaking records clerks) |
|
|
| ▲ | qwertytyyuu 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| test whether eating Teflon is a good way to increase food volume and hence satiety without increasing calorie content.
… |
| |
| ▲ | zdragnar 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Oh wow, I thought you were proposing a silly experiment, but that was the chemistry winner... | |
| ▲ | moi2388 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, I don’t understand how this study was deemed ethical, let alone win. | | |
| ▲ | timr 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Because Teflon is harmless to the human body. It is inert. It interacts with nothing. We literally make replacement body parts out of it. This is a case where conventional wisdom on HN is wildly out of sync with actual science. | | |
| ▲ | cyberpunk 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Drink a pint of it then? | | | |
| ▲ | genter 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Just because it's inert doesn't mean it's harmless. I'm pretty sure that if you shove a wad of it in your windpipe, you won't last very long. Also go check out water poisoning. | | |
| |
| ▲ | OskarS an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I was curious about this study as well, both because the idea seems genius and wildly unsafe. I mean, I know teflon is inert, but really safe for consumption in quantities required for satiation? I googled the paper's title, and here it is: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26810925/ The answer is that it's a study in rats, seemingly (from the abstract) a very successful one. Probably a bad idea to introduce that amount of "forever chemicals" into the environment, but the central idea seems pretty sound. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | belter 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They should add Avi Loeb PhD powered obsession with the exploding traffic of alien probes crossing our Solar System.... Maybe the Galactic Council just opened a new discount shuttle route over Class 4 Civilizations areas like us: (Non-Fusion, Non-Warp and apparently Non-Skeptical...) |
|
| ▲ | eulgro 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I wonder if the guy ingesting Teflon to replace food heard about PFAS...? |
| |
| ▲ | owisd 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Teflon itself is mostly harmless, it’s the byproducts from manufacturing people are more concerned with (PFOA, etc) | |
| ▲ | aeve890 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Right? That was the most weird and dystopic shit in the list. They even filed have a patent! |
|
