Unusual research questions took centre stage Thursday as the 2025 Ig Nobel Prizes were announced in a virtual ceremony.
The awards, established in 1991, celebrate “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think,” with a campy ceremony featuring miniature operas, scientific demos, and ultra-short lectures.
Among the winners, Indian researchers Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal from Shiv Nadar University (SNU) in Uttar Pradesh received the Engineering Design Prize for studying “how foul-smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe-rack.”
Kumar and Mittal’s study, conducted with 149 first-year SNU students, found that shoe odour is a common problem in India, exacerbated by heat, humidity, and lack of proper ventilation.
The team discovered that more than half of students felt uncomfortable about their own or others’ smelly shoes, while 90% used shoe racks to store footwear.
To tackle the problem, Kumar and Mittal designed a shoe rack equipped with UV-C light to kill odour-causing bacteria. Testing on the shoes of SNU athletes showed that two to three minutes of exposure was enough to eliminate the smell.
“Every Ig Nobel prize winner has done something that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think,” said Marc Abrahams, founder of the awards.
The winners will also give free public talks in the weeks following the ceremony, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.
Other categories recognised achievements across literature, biology, and beyond, proving that even the quirkiest research can have serious scientific merit.
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