The world's strangest science awards return this week. The Ig Nobels -- a riff on "ignoble" -- will be awarded Thursday 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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Studying 19 pregnant women, they found the women's lumbar curvature extends across three vertebrae (versus two in men), with beefier, differently angled joints to carry and distribute their growing baby's weight. Because this pattern appeared to be absent in chimpanzees, the closest living relatives to humans, Shapiro and her colleagues argued the human female spine adapted at least two million years ago.
"Any mother can attest to the awkwardness of standing and walking while balancing pregnancy weight in front of the body," said Shapiro in a 2007 press release about the study, which published that year. "Yet our research shows their spines have evolved to make pregnancy safer and less painful than it might have been if these adaptations had not occurred."
AdvertisementWater 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.
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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.
"Actually, it's probably better that the oil stays subsurface, where it can be degraded by microbial organisms," he said. "Keeping it subsurface also keeps it away from marine life in the coastal margins."
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.
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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.
The researchers repurposed the dead spiders as ready-to-use actuators attached to a robotic arm. These "necrobiotic" grippers, as the researchers called them, could lift an object 1.3 times their own weight. The results of the study were published in 2022.
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The eerie but innovative project earned the researchers considerable media coverage, Liu said, and, a year later, the Ig Nobel Prize for mechanical engineering.
Liu hopes the Ig Nobels encourage people to think deeply about the world, however unconventional the questions. "This is a way to let people know about science," she said, "and let them stay curious."
Details
The 2025 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will be held on Thursday at 5 p.m. CDT and streamed on YouTube.
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Miriam Fauzia is a science reporting fellow at The Dallas Morning News. Her fellowship is supported by the University of Texas at Dallas. The News makes all editorial decisions.