Deserving of a Nobel Prize?

The Nobel Prizes were awarded this week. 

Though I’ve always been fascinated by the criteria to be awarded a Nobel Prize I’ve never checked into it – until now. First some history:

According to the website nobelprize.org, “between 1901 and 2025, the Nobel Prizes and the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel were awarded 630 times to 1,021 people and organizations. With some receiving the Nobel Prize more than once, this makes a total of 985 individuals and 28 organisations.”

I discovered that though there are awards for things I don’t understand at all (like the chemistry award – according to the nobelprize.org website, “the Nobel Prize laureates in chemistry 2025 have created molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow. These constructions, metal–organic frameworks, can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyse chemical reactions” – huh?) there are similar “awards” – the Ig Nobel Prizes – for “surprising, humorous, and often seemingly silly research.”

Whereas the Nobel Prizes are quite serious (after all, the will of businessman Alfred Nobel stated that his fortune was to be used to reward “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” ) the Ig Nobel Prizes aren’t nearly as serious.

The Nobel Prize recipients receive a medal, a diploma and money. 

The Ig Nobel Prize recipients receive a fictional 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollar bill and an assortment of other fun items. What is entertaining is that many times true Nobel laureates present the “awards” to recipients, adding a note of scientific recognition to the ceremony.

Before presenting the 2025 awardees let me first share some history:

Founded in 1991 by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate unusual and imaginative discoveries. According to the internet, “the Ig Nobel Prizes [are] an annual parody award for scientific research that ‘first makes people laugh, then makes them think.’”

Among the prizes awarded in 2025 is the recognition of drunken bats and perfect pasta. The Ig Nobel Awards included a prize for studying how alcohol impairs bats’ flight and echolocation, as well as a prize for uncovering the physics behind making a clump-free cacio e pepe pasta sauce.

In biology an award was presented for the experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid being bitten by flies. (By the way, the result was that the zebra stripes significantly decreased both the number of biting flies on the cattle and the animals’ fly-repelling behaviors compared to those with black stripes or no stripes.)

To learn about other 2025 Ig Nobel Prizes, visit https://arstechnica.com/.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I qualify for either the Nobel or the Ig Nobel prizes.