Two Indian engineers who studied how foul-smelling shoes impact the use of shoe-racks are among scientists honoured with the 2025 Ig Nobel Prizes for unusual achievements that draw both laughter and reflection.
Vikash Kumar, assistant professor of design at Shiv Nadar University, and student researcher Sarthak Mittal have won the prize for engineering design, the Ig Nobel organisers announced in Boston on Thursday night.
The project began as a student assignment after Mittal noticed that shoes were often placed outside hostel rooms.
“At first, we thought it was because of the lack of shoe-rack space, but we discovered the real reason was the bad smell,” Kumar said.
The duo relied on medical literature to determine that the source of the smell was mainly bacteria that colonised shoes and designed shoe-racks fitted with ultraviolet lamps — similar to those in water filters — to sanitise them.
“Ideas for design often come from observing something ordinary and the solutions often require multidisciplinary knowledge — in this case, a mix of engineering, design and microbiology,” Kumar told The Telegraph on Friday.
The Ig Nobels, awarded annually since 1991 by the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), a science humour magazine in the US, seek to celebrate achievements that AIR chief editor Marc Abrahams says “first make people laugh and then make them think”.
Experimental setup
“It took some emails from Marc and a video call to convince us this wasn’t a prank,” said Kumar, who teaches human-centred design, and hadn’t heard of the Ig Nobel until he received an email saying his and Mittal’s work had been selected for the prize.
The Ig Nobel for peace went to clinical psychologist Jessica Werthmann in Germany and her colleagues for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language.
The prize for literature went to the late William Bean for persistently recording and analysing the growth rate of one of his fingernails over 35 years and publishing the findings in a series of medical papers.
The psychology prize went to researchers from Australia, Canada and Poland for investigating what happens when someone tells narcissists that they are intelligent.
Four researchers in Italy who studied how certain lizards eat pizza won the nutrition prize.
The paediatric prize went to two US doctors who studied what a nursing baby experiences when its mother eats garlic.
Eleven Japanese researchers shared the biology prize for trying to find out whether cows painted with zebra-like stripes can avoid being bitten by flies.
The chemistry prize went to researchers in Israel and the US for their experiments to test whether eating Teflon might help increase food volume, and hence satiety, without increasing calorie intake.
A nine-country team won the aviation prize for studying whether drinking alcohol can impair bats’ ability to fly.
The physics prize went to four European scientists who studied the physics of pasta sauce — specifically, what contributes to clumps in the sauce.
Neuroscientists in Bengaluru had received an Ig Nobel in 2001 for their study of the habit of nose picking, while a Kerala scientist who used mathematical equations to calculate the surface area of an elephant won the prize in 2003.