Introduction to the Ig Nobel Awards

The world’s strangest science awards returned this week. The Ig Nobels — a riff on “ignoble” — were awarded on Sept. 18 at Boston University in an annual celebration of the quirky side of scientific discovery. Since 1991, more than 300 prizes have gone to 600-plus recipients, including some Texans. Among them is Zhen Liu, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas, who won an Ig Nobel in 2023 for turning dead spiders into gentle robot grippers while a graduate student at Rice University.

Texans Who Have Won an Ig Nobel

Here’s what to know about Texans who have won an Ig Nobel, which is billed as the prize for studies that spark humor first and contemplation later. The Ig Nobel awards are a unique way to recognize scientific research that may seem unusual or unconventional at first but can lead to important discoveries and a deeper understanding of the world.

A Senator’s Award in Chemistry

A non-scientist can snag a scientific award. Case in point: former Texas senator Robert Glasgow. In 1994, Glasgow earned the Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry for sponsoring the Texas Controlled Substances Act. The 1989 law made it “illegal to purchase laboratory glassware without a permit,” noted Scientific American, putting beakers and test tubes in the crosshairs of narcotics enforcement.

Microscope, scales, pipettes and glass flasks in a laboratory. The 1989 Texas Controlled Substances Act made it “illegal to purchase laboratory glassware without a permit,” putting beakers and test tubes in the crosshairs of narcotics enforcement.
According to the Ig Nobels’ website, Glasgow was honored for crusading against these Swiss Army knife tools of the lab. Glasgow, who died in 2023, didn’t attend the ceremony or collect his award. Instead, Tim Mitchell, a representative of scientific glassware maker Corning, accepted on his behalf. Mitchell suggested that, rather than a ban, Texas could require a “five-day cooling-off period,” and joked that glassware can start a habit that leaves the buyer “strung out, begging for grant money.”

Pregnant Women: Resistant to Tipping

Ever wonder why pregnant women don’t tip over? That thought did cross the mind of anthropologist Liza Shapiro, of the University of Texas at Austin. In 2009, Shapiro and her collaborators at Harvard University won the Ig Nobel physics prize for their study on the evolutionary reasons pregnant women don’t tip over. Pregnancy tends to shift the body’s center of mass forward, so many women lean back to stay balanced. This stance can strain the spine, but what Shapiro and her co-authors found was the female spine has extra give, evolving to accommodate the increased load.

Water and Oil Can Mix

It’s a common rule of thumb: Oil and water don’t mix. But that’s not what Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University found in research that earned him and his collaborators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Hawaii the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry. Their study, finalized in 2005, was partly funded by British Petroleum, or BP, which was also awarded the Ig Nobel. The goal of the study was to understand what happens when oil or gas leaks deep underwater, such as during blowouts or pipeline ruptures.

A worker shovels oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off Fourchon Beach in Port Fourchon, La., May 24, 2010.
In still water, oil rises to the surface with little mixing, Socolofsky told NPR in 2010. But the oceans aren’t still. Lab tank experiments and field data showed currents and density layers trap droplets in broad subsurface sheets, creating “intrusions” a few hundred meters above the seafloor — just as observed in the Gulf of Mexico, Socolofsky said.

Dead Spider Robots

In 2019, when Zhen Liu’s professor, Daniel Preston, moved his lab into a new space at Rice University, his team noticed many dead spiders, their legs curled inward. Liu and her colleagues later learned this arachnid death pose happens because spiders don’t have leg muscles. Their legs are instead powered by hydraulic pressure from their circulatory system. With death, the pressure is gone and their eight legs ball up. Since Preston’s lab built microfluidic robots — controlled by fluids rather than gears and motors — Liu and her colleagues wondered if a spider’s built-in hydraulics could be used as a gripper.

Conclusion

The Ig Nobel awards are a unique way to recognize scientific research that may seem unusual or unconventional at first but can lead to important discoveries and a deeper understanding of the world. By celebrating these quirky studies, the Ig Nobels encourage people to think deeply about the world and stay curious. The awards also highlight the importance of interdisciplinary research and collaboration, as many of the winning studies involve