Khaberni - The organizers of the satirical "Ig Nobel" awards, which celebrate unconventional scientific research, have announced the relocation of the annual ceremony from the United States to Europe for the first time.
This decision came due to increased concerns about the inability of winners and journalists to obtain U.S. entry visas this year.
The "Ig Nobel" Awards (Ig Nobel) were founded in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, editor of the humorous "Annals of Improbable Research" journal, as a satirical counterpart to the prestigious Nobel Prizes.
The official motto of the awards, also known as "Nobel Prize for Foolishness" or "Nobel Prize for Scientific Foolishness," is to honor achievements that "first make people laugh, then make them think".
The awards ceremony is organized by the Annals of Improbable Research journal. This year, the thirty-sixth ceremony will be held in Zurich, Switzerland.
The ceremony is usually held in the United States during September, a few weeks before the announcement of the real Nobel Prizes.
Marc Abrahams, the ceremony director and magazine editor, said in an email interview with the Associated Press: "Last year, visiting this country became unsafe. In good conscience, we cannot ask this year's winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the United States."
This decision comes amidst President Donald Trump’s widespread campaign on immigration, which focused on deporting undocumented immigrants in the United States, as well as holders of student visas and reciprocal visitor visas.
Over the past thirty-five years, winners have traveled to the United States to receive their prizes, where they are greeted with a barrage of paper airplanes.
Last year, the winners' list included a team of Japanese researchers who studied whether painting cows with zebra-like stripes could prevent flies from biting them, and another team from Africa and Europe studied the types of pizza lizards prefer to eat.
The ceremony also honored winners in ten categories, including a group from Europe that found that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person's ability to speak a foreign language, and a researcher who studied nail growth for decades.
However, four out of the ten winners last year chose not to travel to Boston to attend the ceremony.
In previous years, the ceremony was held at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Boston University.
Abrahams said that this year's ceremony will be held in collaboration with entities from the "ETH" domain, which is affiliated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and the University of Zurich.
Milo Bohan, an epidemiologist at the University of Zurich and recipient of the Swiss "Ig Nobel" award in 2017, welcomed the ceremony.
Abrahams explained that the ceremony will be held in Zurich every other year, and in the intervening years, the ceremony will move to other European cities. There are no immediate plans to return the ceremony to the United States.
