Science Communication – Students Against Pseudoscience

Ig Nobel: The whimsy and the magic of science

Author: Maya Lopez (Co-President)

When the 2025 Nobel Prizes were announced last month, Cambridge’s science enthusiasts and news junkies alike were buzzing with excitement, discussing the laureates, dissecting the research, and tallying college wins. However, I noticed less talk around a month earlier on the Ig Nobels”. Maybe because no Cambridge members were awarded this year? Or perhaps because it’s not serious enough?? … Whatever the reason, today we will take a break from all the rigidity of science and the recent serious concerns around politics contesting science. Instead, let’s take a look at the whimsical research that is also… seriously a science, which, as Nature once put it, “The Ig Nobel awards are arguably the highlight of the scientific calendar”.

Are Ig Nobel Prizes a real award?

This is one of the top Google searches with the keywords: “Ig Nobel prize”. The answer? YES*. It is a very real award with ceremony and all that has now been going on for 35 years. But “*” was not a typo as it is also, yes, a parody of the all-too-famous Nobel Prize, which probably needs no explanation of its own (hence the namesake and the pun of “ignoble”). For those of you who are unfamiliar, Ig Nobel is annually awarded by an organization called Improbable Research since 1991 with a motto of: “research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK”. This organization also publishes a “scientific humor magazine” (who knew that was a thing?) called Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), so they, in a sense, can be seen as a specialist that focuses on promoting public engagement with scientific research through fun. The Ig Nobel Prizes are often presented by Nobel laureates in a ceremony held at the MIT or other universities in the Boston area. Much like the “real” Nobel prizes, it has different award disciplines like: physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, literature, economics, and peace, plus a few extra categories such as public health, engineering, biology, and interdisciplinary research. (The award categories do vary from year to year, though.) The winners are awarded with a banknote worth 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars (a currency that is no longer used; roughly worth US$0.40), so it’s not really about the monetary value. They also get an opportunity to give a public lecture upon award, but researchers do face the risk of being interrupted by an 8-year-old girl (or, in the case of 2025, a researcher dressed up as one) crying “Please stop: I’m bored”, if it dares go on for too long. The ceremony, as you can imagine from here, has a number of running jokes, and if you are interested, you can watch the whole ceremony of 2025 on Youtube.

Bringing “in” science to the everyday curiosity:

So it’s a parody, yes, but the award does exist and is given to actual researchers. The quickest way to get a sense of the Ig Nobel might be to simply browse the list of research that was awarded prizes. This year, we’ve got:

Category	Title	Reference
Aviation	Studying whether ingesting alcohol can impair bats’ ability to fly and also‹ their ability to echolocate	_{doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2010.02.006}
Biology	their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid being bitten by flies.	_{doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223447}
Chemistry	experiments to test whether eating Teflon is a good way to increase food volume and hence satiety without increasing calorie content	_{doi.org/10.1177%2F1932296815626726}_{patents.google.com/patent/US9924736B2/en}
Engineering design	analyzing, from an engineering design perspective, how foul-smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe-rack	_{doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2229-8_33}
Literature	persistently recording and analyzing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years	_{doi.org/10.1038/jid.1953.5}_{pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2249062}_{doi.org/10.1001/archinte.1968.00300090069016} _{doi.org/10.1001/archinte.1974.00320210107015} _{doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-4362.1976.tb00696.x} _{doi.org/10.1001/archinte.1980.00330130075019}
Nutrition	studying the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza	_{doi.org/10.1111/aje.13100}
Peace	showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language	_{doi.org/10.1177/0269881117735687}
Pediatrics	studying what a nursing baby experiences when the baby’s mother eats garlic	_{pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1896276}
Physics	discoveries about the physics of pasta sauce, especially the phase transition that can lead to clumping, which can be a cause of unpleasantness	_{doi.org/10.1063/5.0255841}
Psychology	investigating what happens when you tell narcissists — or anyone else — that they are intelligent	_{doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2021.101595}

I think the goal of “laugh and think” is clearly successful in all of this research. But speaking of thinking, some of these research topics made me wonder (and maybe you are too): “Why would you investigate that?” (What adult would?) or “Is this real, funded/published research”? What I want to highlight (and what may not be clear from the brief list on the Wikipedia page), is that they all have proper references attached to them. So yes, though their published titles might sound a bit more academic or “stuffy” (though often by not much), they are actual peer-reviewed papers!

Are you ridiculing science?

This question on the official FAQ page caught my attention, because I, as an IgNoble enthusiast, hadn’t imagined any serious criticism against these awards. Digging a bit deeper, I found that decades ago, the UK’s then-chief scientific adviser – Sir Robert May – made a formal ~~complaint~~ request that “no British scientists (should) be considered for an IgNobel, for fear of harming their career prospects”. (Note that the UK, alongside Japan and the USA (no wonder I’m acquainted with this prize), are regulars of this prize as a nation, winning awards nearly every year.) Furthermore, the article reads “He was particularly concerned when ground-breaking research into the reasons why breakfast cereal becomes soggy (by the University of East Anglia) won a prize,” essentially hinting at the concern of public ridiculing science (as a whole?). If you think about it, such a general attitude of “it’s not with the scientific investigation unless it’s clearly applicable/translatable/important” is perhaps far too typical, especially in basic sciences.

However, I think the founder of the prize, Marc Abrahams, had the best defence against the practice of “rewarding silly science”.

“Most of the great technological and scientific breakthroughs were laughed at when they first appeared. People laughed at someone staring at the mould on a piece of bread, but without that there would be no antibiotics… A lot of people are frightened of science or think it is evil, because they had a teacher when they were 12 years old who put them off. If we can get people curious and make them laugh, maybe they will pick up a book one day. We really want more people involved in science and I think the webcast will help do that.”

Slightly on a tangent, but “Maths Anxiety” is a recognized experience that many develop during childhood. While no research might exist on this (yet), I also suspect a similar phenomenon with STEM at large. Sometimes I get comments from students taking humanities subjects (even in Cambridge!) like “wow, you’re doing a real/serious degree”, or “science sounds so difficult”. For some people, “being put off” by science might trace back to a negative experience during their first formal introduction to science as a subject in school. In that case, bringing their interest back to science with all-serious demeanor and stuffy topics might be quite a high barrier to cross. However, looking at the Ig award list from earlier, and how quickly they make you go “huh” after the laugh, I can’t help but think that these funny, curious studies might be the push they need to ignite their curiosity and welcome them back to scientific inquiry without any pressure.

The satire (and controversy?) of IgNobel

That being said, not all IgNobel prizes were specifically awarded to quirky “research that cannot (or should not) be reproduced”. It was also sometimes awarded as a satire. In the recent case of 2020, Ig Nobel Prize for Medical Education was awarded to Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan. Now, before you start typing away your complaints and protests (or throwing paper airplanes), hear the reason why: they were awarded for “using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can”. I’d say that makes you think quite a bit, especially as a person in the scientific community.

If you consider these instances in isolation, perhaps there is some point to what the former scientific chief advisor was saying, and that a serious researcher might not want to be associated with this prize (kinda like the Raspberry award, I guess?). However, this was apparently not a popular opinion, at least in the UK scientific community, which backlashed at the comment earlier. To this day, we get awardees from the UK in the Ignobel prizes.

Legacy beyond the funny and curious:

Parody and satire, yes, but in case you think this is still a long post for much ado about nothing, as it’s still in the realm of a joke, I want to present you this final case of when these jokes lead to “actual” science (not that they weren’t real science to begin with, but…). Take Andre Geim for instance, who shared the 2000 Ig Nobel in Physics with Michael Berry for levitating a frog – yes, a real frog – using magnets. Ten years later, he went on to win the actual Nobel Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking research on graphene. This itself may sound like a lucky coincidence but it is also worth mentioning that this frog experiment was reported in 2022 to be the inspiration (at least partially) behind China’s lunar gravity research facility.

These are not the only examples where such “silly research” actually ended up having real-world impact and use. In 2006, the Ig Nobel Prize in Biology was awarded to a study showing that a species of malaria-carrying mosquitoes (Anopheles gambiae) is attracted equally to Limburger cheese smell and human foot odor. This initial study was published in 1996, and the results suggested the strategic placement of traps baiting this mosquito with Limburger cheese to combat the Malaria epidemic in Africa. While these applications of the study might not be immediate, I think what allows for this translation (aside from being oddly specific) is partly due to the cost-effectiveness. The more typical “scientific” solution one might envision with disease control might involve genomics, vaccines, or pharmaceuticals. While they are all state-of-the-art and highly effective (and certainly have the sci-fi appeal), the cost both in terms of financial and time resources, can be expensive. Compared to that… cheese? I’m guessing that it’s more budget friendly and easy to implement. This research as well as this year’s award in biology about painting (zebra-like) stripes to cows as a mosquito repellent, all make me re-appreciate that sometimes the viable solution might be something unexpectedly simple and close at hand. These studies show how science, even in its quirkiest forms, can indicate practical and effective solutions to improve everyday lives.

Diversification of sci-comm tactics

Whether you admire the nobleness of the Ig Nobel, think it’s all fun and whimsy sci-comm, or avoid it altogether as an aspiring “serious” researcher, I think this still stands as a rare gem in the diversity of what science-communication can look like. In recent years, “debunking style’ science communication is seemingly (back) on surge, as well as various independent video-based science communication content creators (such as the guest speaker we had last week). In the age where science itself and its institutions are increasingly seen through a critical eye or outright contested, I do understand the urge to fact bomb or even isolate myself in all the “seriousness”. This is especially tempting when we know that some of the fruit of scientific research, like vaccines, can save lives, and we desperately want people to protect themselves. I personally don’t consider myself especially witty, but celebrate those who can masterfully blend research and humor to entice audiences and reignite their interest in science. Of course, not a single sci-comm tactic is bulletproof – some, like Sir Robert, may find these things distasteful, while others simply prefer something “serious,” and that’s ok. But science as a community might just benefit from having such a quirky tactic under its sleeves, and the diversity in science communication approaches might very well be the best shot we’ve got for this day and age of increasing division. Who knows, maybe some researchers will look into the efficacy of the IgNobel prize headlines against the science-anxiety.

Sound of Science

Author: Maya Lopez (Blog Chief Editor)

Some of you watching a Sci-Fi film may hear dialogue (perhaps especially those poorly written?) and feel like “yeah, that’s Sci-Fi jargon”. These terms may be of some far-future technology that you are certain doesn’t exist, or perhaps they are just some Latin portmanteau that sounds “science-y”. But what feeling do you get when you read this:

Introductory paragraph found in the entry of SCP-1158. Citation: “SCP-1158” by NotoriousMDG, from the SCP Wiki. Source: https://scpwiki.com/scp-1158. Licensed under CC-BY-SA.

It may read as technical instruction, or a heavily descriptive excerpt from something like Wikipedia (except, wait a minute, this plant thing feeds off of… mammal?!) One might say it has an “academic tone,” and that is definitely what this writing was aiming for. However, the excerpt is not from an actual scientific source, but a report of the SCP Foundation: “a fictional organization featured in stories created by contributors on the SCP Wiki, a wiki-based collaborative writing project.” This is ultimately a shared fictional universe work where many writers often submit strange to straight-up creepy pasta tales in such a scientific tone. These works are considered to “contain elements” of science fiction and often horror, but it is not pseudoscience because, well, they are published as fiction. Hence, these writing styles are rather considered “quasi-scientific and academic”, but today I decided to overthink what about these writings that we register as “scientific”, in an attempt to learn how science is perceived. Furthermore, if a fictional writing can sound scientific, what happens if someone masters such an iconic “sound of science” with malicious intent, and what does the modern scientific report even sound like?

Science-y writing features as seen in SCP

Shared universe is essentially a writing system in which multiple writers take a common world setting and explore different stories within it. I guess it’s kind of like one big fandom and all their fanfics, but they are all canon in a sense. The OG example that regained popularity upon the COVID-19 pandemic is perhaps HP Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos or Lovecraftian horror (who incidentally took an anti-occultism stance with Houdini back in the day). In terms of the lore, the SCP universe explores the “findings and activities” of a fictional international organization called SCP Foundation. It essentially is portrayed as a sort of private, international scientific research institution/secret society, functioning as the research body against anomalies while acting as a paramilitary intelligence agency. Despite being a private initiative, the Foundation aims to protect the world by capturing and containing “anomalies” that defy the laws of nature, which are referred to as “SCP objects” or “SCPs”. In actuality, these SCPs stem from some sort of photo/concept on the internet (such as an empty Ikea floor to a coffee vending machine) and the writers employ their full Sci-Fi creativity to transform that into either living creatures, artifacts, locations, abstract concepts, or incomprehensible entities with supernatural or unusual properties. Depending on their said properties, it could be dangerous to the surroundings or possibly the entire world; therefore, the motto of the foundation: Secure, Contain, Protect.

Aside from the shared settings, SCP is exceptional in how they have extensive writing guidance on the “reports” to be submitted. Most of their articles are stand-alone articles in the report format called “Special Containment Procedures” of the specific SCP object. Typically, the SCP objects are assigned a unique ID followed by code referred to as “Object Class”. This classification system according to its lore is suppose to reflect how difficult to contain the object, but stylistically, there is a similarity to taxonomical categorization system (ie Linnaean taxonomy) or even Chemical Hazard Classificaions found in SDS sheets (which are, for you non-lab dwellers, a detailed handling procedure for individual chemicals and reagents). Particularly in the latter, the different hazards are not only identified through pictograms for various categories, but can also have further indications of danger levels. In labs, we use these sheets to construct overall risk assessments of any wet-lab (ie, non-computational) experiments. Thereby, the structural mirroring of “Special Containment Procedures” to scientific handling procedures like SDS sheets inherently adds to the “sciency” realism.

Additionally, these containment procedures often come with ”Addenda” (which can be images, research data, interviews, history, or status updates). While you might expect the research data to be the bulk of the body of the writing in an actual scientific report, extensive “supplementary material/information” is nearly unavoidable in modern science. In fact, if you look at an older research publication (for example, even the novel prize-winning human iPSC paper from 2007), they often used to use “(Data not shown)” for less important data that could not fit into the main figures. However, due to increasingly online publication and the data repositories, the data became increasingly accessible and open, perhaps making these supplementaries more ubiquitous and extensive. Personally, the status updates of SCP addenda also remind me of program package manuals, such as those on GitHub. While this may not sound explicitly “natural science” like, it is in fact quite common for a science niche like bioinformatics to develop computational programs, which are maintained and updated on Git pages that accompany the main publication of the methods paper.

Finally, the key stylistic feature of the SCP is perhaps not what is written but rather what isn’t. They utilize black redaction bars and “data expunged” markings to give the readers the impression of sensitive data. While this is not common academic practice, censorship and redaction were not unheard of in some discipline that is inherently more national-risk sensitive area of technologies and science (such as nuclear energy), especially in a historical context. Philosophically, the act of masking information and some data is arguably not helpful in a pure academic sense, given that even negative results in theory should clarify what is not true for the pursuit of truth. However, it is also true that some information (especially those posing a security risk) may need to be censored from individuals without a certain level of accreditation and security clearance. I think this writing style enhances the “authoritativeness” and secretive nature of reports, adding a sense of immersion as if not only these scientific reports are written but “some higher-up” has then further evaluated them before publication and maybe even reassessed, changing what can and can’t be shared.

Down the rabbit hole of science-sounding writing outside of fiction

Of course, I’m not here to pick apart this shared universe entertainment that they are pSEUdo-SCIenTiFIC and bad. In fact, it is very entertaining fiction, and I invite anyone who enjoys a bit of Twilight Zone-like tales to give it a try. However, understanding that “sciencey” tones can be manufactured regardless of whether the content is rooted in reality, does come with a possibly dangerous use of these languages – especially for things that are not published as outright entertainment. Imagine if such a “sciencey” tone was part of text intended to sell you something; is this just as non-malignant as fiction?

Such was arguably the finding in a 2015 research, where nearly 300 cosmetics ads appeared in notable magazines including Vogue. As briefed in the Scientific American’s podcast, the research ranked each ad on a scale ranging from acceptable to outright lie. Unfortunately, only 18% of key claims of such ads could be “verified” to be true by the scientists, and 23% were outright wrong. However, I was fascinated by the fact that nearly half of the ads were “too vague to even classify”. Obviously, if it’s an outright lie, someone could sue and FDA (in the case of the USA) can take action. However, it is in fact these grey area that keeps such serious charges away. In theory, the Federal Trade Commission and other trade-related organizations could take action if some ads were misleading enough, but I found it fascinating how marketers can aim to cleverly blend a science-y tone with a sales pitch to strategically blur the line between science-based facts and catch-copy.

In fact, this approach of mixing some “sciencey tone” (or some actual scientific fact) and presenting that to a non-science-backed claim (or “story”) seems to be a tactic that’s not limited to sales: it may be just as useful to propagate a desired narrative. Such example was what I found when I was looking through the articles of Children’s Health Defence. This is the organization we talked about in the context of anti-vaccine (and we had our critical viewing event of their anti-vax film filled with pseudoscientific rhetoric, which we since then signed up for their mailing list because… watching that film required email registration ~~and it allows us to keep eye on next pseudoscience trend that’s up and coming~~). It is “associated” with the now (in)famous RFK Jr. While many people are probably familiar with them as mis- (or dis-?) information talk point on vaccine – especially after the viral Bernie’s onesies comment, perhaps people are less familiar with how… rigorous, they are with science mis-communication on public health as a whole.

On their website, they have a whole science section dedicated to their “science communication” articles. Honestly, going into this, I was very skeptical of how they might approach science communication based on their anti-vax film tactics. I expected more of an emotional roller coaster and bombardment of all sort of individual testimonies to rile up the audience’s worries and fears, making sure that everyone has something to be concerned about. But I decided to read one of their article anyway, which alleges the dangers of babies facing unexpected “side-effects” like diabetes from antibiotic exposure. The article was written by a frequent writer for CHD – a doctor, who apparently is an “American alternative medicine proponent, osteopathic physician, and Internet business personality… markets largely unproven dietary supplements and medical devices”. Okay, that’s off for an interesting start, but I was more surprised by the way the article was written.

The article, obviously, does not hide its rather scary main assertion from the get-go, where babies get a higher chance of diabetes DUE TO antibiotic exposure. However, they actually start by sharing a very medically sound definition of things like Type 1 diabetes and autoimmune disease, while hyperlinking to sources like medical webpages. Then, it essentially writes a short review/summary of a science report published in Science, describing a mouse experiment published just a month prior (I mean, are they’re keeping up with new science publications just like PhDs? dedication!). And what surprised me is that this research paper summary section is… actually pretty decent, concisely summarizing the gist of the findings: how antibiotics delivery in a certain prenatal time window results in microbiome disruption, leading to reduced pancreatic β-cell development. This portion is not only a robust summary of a scientific literature but inevitably builds the tone of authority and science-ness (even sharing the fungus’s Latin name!). They similarly then moved on to discuss a pediatric study of diabetes and microbiome in the context of humans. However, it is the following section that gets slippery. It then runs off to immediately focus on the “side effects of antibiotics” (without, for example, considering why antibiotics are carefully administered or needed in the first place, because… under what circumstances would THAT happen? And aren’t children just being bombarded by these toXiNS everywhere?? (…I am being sarcastic.)) I suppose this is fair, as that can be a focus, but they do something very tricky here. They essentially list a number of possible side effects, mostly linking to relevant, properly peer-reviewed published reports to back their claim on how IT COULD be harmful. However, look further down and THEN they finally list “links to autism risk”, which, unlike side effects listed earlier, is only backed by an article, not from a peer-reviewed source, but some website called MERCOLA that requires email registration to read and which… oh, its the website that the author runs. Honestly, the diabetes risk assertion aside, this is impressive craftsmanship if it were some SCP work: on how well they are “blending away” sources of perhaps less certainty to those more legitimate in the scientific consensus, while also boosting their scientific tone and authority throughout.

Meanwhile, in real science…

So far, we discussed the use of “science-sounding” language and presentation in both fiction and (unfortunately) non-fiction. But now let’s explore the more recent movement in the real scientific writing. Most of us, at some point in our secondary education, may have been taught the rules for academic or scientific writing, such as passive voice, third-person, etc. These are, in fact, some of the specific stylistic guidelines that the SCP writing guide (alongside a strictly defined list of technical words to increase precision in communication) encourages the writers to use this as well. However, such passive voice, particularly in the modern science community, is often seen as overused, and our literary impression of this voice as cold, removed, and overly technical is a shared sentiment amongst academics too. In fact, as some university academic writing guides would clarify, many major publications now ENCOURAGE writing to be in a more active voice. Why? Aside from the tonal impressions, well, because it’s much SIMPLER. Focusing on clearer and concise writing (and I’m still really working on it… trust me) is extremely encouraged in modern science, not only for general readability but because it facilitates researchers to understand each other better across the world. Another explanation of this trend I’ve once heard is scientists reclaiming more of the authorship (both the credit and arguably the responsibility) of the claims we are putting out in the world. We are (and have been for a while, actually) progressing into a field where scientists are using THEIR voice to communicate the science they actually did and how THEY interpret it, rather than the stereotypical “neutral and objective” reporting of “what has been done and was observed”. Ultimately, this may be more accurate as who is to say that observations made are absolute when reader academics should be free to (re-)interpret them based on their expertise. Evidence is that, but we are also encouraged to critique, reassess, and question to see if we are convinced by it.

Finally, this change in the language of science is not limited to the reports written for fellow academics to read, but also to the wider world. There is an increasing effort by researchers to use “plain English” to proactively communicate the science in a way everyone outside the field can understand (ie, much LESS jargon). This is coming from an increasing interest in reading science from outside of the academic community, and in fact, all the leading researchers of labs in my institute, for example, have such a Plain English summary on their website to explain what their research encompasses. So science, unsurprisingly, is once again evolving – now to be more accessible and more communicative than in the past. And science will probably continue to evolve in the way we communicate because ultimately science should strive to communicate clearly, for it’s the presenting evidence and methods that matter, which should be debated, not the how it sounds. So next time you see an ad or some internet article that sounds so… “sciencey”, try not to jump to the conclusion that this IS science by its tone, and make sure to look into the actual science behind it being discussed. And if this “science” being explained sparked your curiosity, try to read around it; see if there is a consensus or debate even within the academic community, and critically assess for yourself whether you are convinced by the evidence. …Well, unless it’s SCP-2521, also known as ●●|●●●●●|●●|●, and then maybe don’t read (and definitely not write) about it 😉