Prelims: Current events of national and international importance | Awards
Why in news?
Two engineers from India win 35th annual Ig Nobel Prize awards for engineering design.
Aim-The Ig Nobel Prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative and stimulate people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.
It is awarded annually.
Created in -1991 by Marc Abrahams, editor of the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR).
Motto — “First make people laugh, and then make them think”.
Organized by -The scientific humor magazine “Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)”
Categories -10 prizes are awarded in many categories - Physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, literature, economics, peace, public health, engineering, biology, and interdisciplinary research.
The 2025 ceremony, held virtually from Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, USA.
Ig Nobel prize, 2025– In engineering design category - Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal (22nd for India).
Reason - For analyzing, from an engineering design perspective, how foul-smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe-rack.
In 2022- An international team from India, China, Malaysia, and the US won the mechanical engineering prize “for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools”.
In 2020- India and Pakistan had shared the peace prize “for having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other’s doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door”.
