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Meet the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize winners

Does alcohol enhance one’s foreign language fluency? Do West African lizards have a preferred pizza topping? And can painting cows with zebra stripes help repel biting flies? These and other unusual research questions were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2025 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it’s that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science.

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words.

Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.

This deadly brain disorder can develop a decade after you get the measles — and it just killed a child

A school-aged child in L.A. recently died after developing a rare neurological disease years after contracting the measles.

Authorities didn’t reveal many details about the case, except that the child was infected with measles as an infant, before they were eligible for the vaccine.

Measles is a respiratory disease that spreads easily from person to person. The first dose of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is routinely recommended for kids between 12 and 15 months old. A second dose is given before kindergarten or first grade.

Boron replaces metal by forming complexes with olefins, reducing toxicity and cost

When it comes to eliminating toxic and expensive heavy metals in the chemical industry, a new study from the University of Würzburg points the way forward.

The team led by chemistry professor Holger Braunschweig at the University of Würzburg is investigating the “metal-mimetic” properties of main group elements such as boron. They have shown that under certain conditions, boron can mimic the reaction behavior of metals without being toxic or as expensive as metals.

The article published in Nature Chemistry shows that boron can also form so-called π complexes with , which are similar in their properties and behavior to the complexes of transition metals with olefins. The latter compounds are intermediates in many large-scale catalytic processes in industry.

The Muscle-Brain Axis and Neurodegenerative Diseases: The Key Role of Mitochondria in Exercise-Induced Neuroprotection

Regular exercise is associated with pronounced health benefits. The molecular processes involved in physiological adaptations to exercise are best understood in skeletal muscle. Enhanced mitochondrial functions in muscle are central to exercise-induced adaptations. However, regular exercise also benefits the brain and is a major protective factor against neurodegenerative diseases, such as the most common age-related form of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or the most common neurodegenerative motor disorder, Parkinson’s disease. While there is evidence that exercise induces signalling from skeletal muscle to the brain, the mechanistic understanding of the crosstalk along the muscle–brain axis is incompletely understood. Mitochondria in both organs, however, seem to be central players.

Engineers Bring Quantum Internet to Commercial Fiber for the First Time

A new integrated chip demonstrates how quantum networks could communicate using today’s internet protocols over existing commercial fiber-optic cables. In a groundbreaking experiment, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania successfully extended quantum networking beyond the laboratory by tra

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