Marc Abrahams

Every September since 1991, Harvard University has hosted a partiularly special ceremony to present the ten annual Ig Nobel Prizes, handed out by genuine Nobel laureates. As with the Scandinavian version, the scientists to be recognized are chosen through a rigorous process of selection. But these prizes honor achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

That’s the way Marc Abrahams, the originator and emcee of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, wanted it to be.  Fun and fanciful science also meet in the Annals of Improbable Research, the magazine Abrahams has edited for decades. The latest special issue, which is completely devoted to research on pizza and popcorn, contains an article by science writer Russ Hodge on the evolution and biology of pizza, carried out with Miguel Andrade and scientists at Mainz University. They collected data on pizza ingredients from across Europe to develop the first phylogeny of pizza, a species that has long resisted analysis by scientists because it tends to spontaneously disappear from laboratory cultures.

Language: English