The Ig Nobel Prizes recognize unusual research that has scientific value, honoring discoveries that entertain while prompting more reflection.At this year’s ceremony, Italian physicists were honored in the Physics category for their pasta sauce research.Their award highlights how even lighthearted experiments can uncover surprising (and practical) insights into daily life.
Scientists conduct numerous critical studies to improve the world around us in ways big and small. Some study medicine to help us live healthier, longer lives, while others explore the natural world, ensuring ecosystems thrive for future generations.
Still, others focus on things that simply make us happier. For example, a group of Italian researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, researchers from the University of Barcelona, and those from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria worked together to understand how to create the perfect plate of cacio e pepe. And while you might think it’s a frivolous scientific pursuit, their work just took home a humorous yet very prestigious prize.
In September, the scientific magazine Annals of Improbable Research held its annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, which honors “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” While it all seems like it may be in jest, the organization notes that the judging and selection of winners is taken very seriously because “a lot of good science gets attacked because of its absurdity. A lot of bad science gets revered despite its absurdity.”
The awards, created in 1991 by American mathematician and researcher Marc Abrahams, are held each year at Harvard and MIT, emphasizing that, while fun, they do have a serious backbone. Nobel Laureates are on hand to present the awards, where the winners are given 60 seconds to explain their work. Many do so through skits and songs to maintain the light-hearted nature of the ceremony. However, the day after the event, the winners gather for an informal salon, where they can ask each other questions about their research and give brief lectures.
The winners also often cite the award for helping catapult their research careers to new heights. “It was useful for my career because people wanted to talk about it,” Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London, who was honored for her work on London taxi drivers having larger hippocampi than the average person, shared with Nature. “It was on the front pages of newspapers when it came out and struck a chord with people.”
The same will most certainly be true for the Italian physicists who took home an Ig in the Physics category “for discoveries about the physics of pasta sauce, especially the phase transition that can lead to clumping, which can be a cause of unpleasantness.”
As Food & Wine previously reported about the work, the study aimed to understand how to create the perfect “texture and creaminess” of the sauce. They found that the key is in the “phase behavior” of the cacio and pepe sauce, noting that the essential strategy is “to wait some time before mixing water and cheese, to let the water cool down. This is because, at high temperatures, cheese proteins can either form clumps upon denaturation or simply aggregate, therefore ruining the sauce.” To put it simply, if the water is too hot when you add it to the cheese, you might end up with a lumpy sauce.
Notably, researcher Matteo Ciarchi told Physics Magazine that they “did not waste a single drop of sauce” during the research project. “We would do the famous Italian scarpetta thing, which is to take a piece of bread and clean the plate — or the petri dish, in the case of our experiments.”
Ivan Di Terlizzi, another researcher on the project, importantly added that if someone is die-hard about making cacio e pepe the traditional way (with just cheese, pepper, and pasta water), “we’d advise that you let the pasta water cool down before combining with the cheese. That’s because the aggregation happens at high temperatures. If you use cooler water, you give the starch more time to bind to the cheese proteins.”
And now we’re hungry for more great science and great pasta.
The 2025 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
Literature Prize: The late Dr. William B. Bean, for persistently recording and analyzing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years.Psychology Prize: Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles Gignac, for investigating what happens when you tell narcissists — or anyone else — that they are intelligent.Nutrition Prize: Daniele Dendi, Gabriel H. Segniagbeto, Roger Meek, and Luca Luiselli, for studying the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza.Pediatrics Prize: Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp, for studying what a nursing baby experiences when the baby’s mother eats garlic.Biology Prize: Tomoki Kojima, Kazato Oishi, Yasushi Matsubara, Yuki Uchiyama, Yoshihiko Fukushima, Naoto Aoki, Say Sato, Tatsuaki Masuda, Junichi Ueda, Hiroyuki Hirooka, and Katsutoshi Kino, for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid being bitten by flies.Chemistry Prize: Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich, and Frank Greenway, for experiments to test whether eating Teflon [a form of plastic more formally called “polytetrafluoroethylene”] is a good way to increase food volume and hence satiety without increasing calorie content.Peace Prize: Fritz Renner, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field, and Jessica Werthmann, for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language.Engineering Design Prize: Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal, for analyzing, from an engineering design perspective, how foul-smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe rack.Aviation Prize: Francisco Sánchez, Mariana Melcón, Carmi Korine, and Berry Pinshow, for studying whether ingesting alcohol can impair bats’ ability to fly and also their ability to echolocate.Physics Prize: Giacomo Bartolucci, Daniel Maria Busiello, Matteo Ciarchi, Alberto Corticelli, Ivan Di Terlizzi, Fabrizio Olmeda, Davide Revignas, and Vincenzo Maria Schimmenti, for discoveries about the physics of pasta sauce, especially the phase transition that can lead to clumping, which can be a cause of unpleasantness.
Dining and Cooking