BOSTON (AP) — The annual Ig Nobels, a satirical award for scientific achievement, are shifting for the first time from the United States to Europe due to concerns about attendees getting visas, organizers announced Monday.
Organized by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights research that makes people laugh and then think, the 36th annual ceremony will be held in Zurich. It’s usually held in the U.S. in September, a few weeks before the actual Nobel Prizes are announced.
"During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country," Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, told The Associated Press in an email interview. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year.”
The move comes amid President Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration, in which he has focused on deporting migrants illegally in the United States, as well as holders of student and visitor exchange visas.
Winners have for the past 35 years traveled to the United States to collect their prizes — and be showered with paper airplanes. Last year, winners included a team of researchers from Japan studying whether painting cows with zebralike stripes would prevent flies from biting them. Another group from Africa and Europe pondered the types of pizza that lizards preferred to eat.
The year’s winners, honored in 10 categories, also include a group from Europe that found drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak a foreign language and a researcher who studied fingernail growth for decades.
But four of the 10 winners last year chose not to travel to Boston for the ceremony. In previous years, the ceremony has taken place at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.
This year’s ceremony is being produced in collaboration with institutions of the ETH Domain, a domain of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and the University of Zurich, Abrahams said.
“Switzerland has nurtured many unexpected good things — Albert Einstein’s physics, the world economy, and the cuckoo clock leap to mind — and is again helping the world appreciate improbable people and ideas,” he said.
Milo Puhan, epidemiologist at the University of Zurich and Swiss Ig Nobel Prize winner in 2017, welcomed the ceremony. “The Ig Nobel Prize makes research visible, and does so with a wink,” said Puhan, whose research ”showed that playing the didgeridoo trains the muscles and structures that keep the upper airways open, thereby reducing nighttime snoring and the severity of sleep apnea syndrome.”
Abrahams said the ceremony will be held in Zurich every other year. In between, the ceremony will shift to other European cities.
There are no immediate plans to return the ceremony to the United States.
FILE - A detail of the 2025 Ig Nobel award, one of many that will be awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine for silly sounding scientific discoveries that often have surprisingly practical applications, is displayed, Sept. 17, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)
FILE - An 2025 Ig Nobel award, one of many that will be awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine for silly sounding scientific discoveries that often have surprisingly practical applications, is displayed, Sept. 17, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)
The Miami Dolphins are moving on from Tua Tagovailoa but his contract will still be an albatross on the team for two more seasons.
The Dolphins announced their plans Monday to cut Tua Tagovailoa — less than two years after he signed a $212 million extension with the club — in a move that will leave a record $99.2 million of dead money on Miami's salary cap.
The charge for Tagovailoa can be split over the 2026 and ‘27 seasons if the Dolphins designate him to be cut after June 1 but nevertheless it will have to hit the team’s salary cap, topping the $85 million charge Denver took when cutting Russell Wilson two years ago.
A dead money charge is any money on a team's salary cap for a player no longer on the roster. In most cases, the dead money charges come from signing bonus money that has already been paid to a player but was pro-rated for multiple years on the salary cap to lower the single-year charge.
Teams can spread out bonuses for up to five years — with the charge being split evenly among those years — but that charge accelerates to the salary cap when a team trades or releases a player before it has all hit the cap.
In Tagovailoa's case, there was also $54 million in guaranteed salary for 2026 for which the Dolphins are still responsible. Tagovailoa has already found a new team, agreeing with the Atlanta Falcons on a one-year deal, a person with knowledge of the quarterback’s contract told The Associated Press on Monday. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the contract can’t be finalized until the new league year begins on Wednesday.
Tagovailoa is expected to get a little more than $1 million for the veteran minimum salary, which will eventually be credited to Miami's salary cap.
NFL teams have been more willing in recent years to take on hefty dead money charges as the salary cap keeps rising at a high rate, making the move less punitive than it used to be.
Here's a look at some of the largest dead money cap hits NFL teams have incurred after moving on from players, with numbers from the website Over The Cap:
The Dolphins got very little production out of Tagovailoa after the hefty contract extension they handed him in the 2024 offseason. Tagovailoa had been under contract on the fifth-year option of his rookie deal for $23.2 million in 2024 and the team could have used a franchise tag of about $38 million for 2025 instead of giving him an extension.
Instead, Tagovailoa will be paid nearly $125 million for that one extra season in which he made 14 starts, throwing for 2,660 yards and 20 TDs as the Dolphins finished 7-10 and fired both general manager Chris Grier and coach Mike McDaniel.
The Broncos traded two first-round picks and two seconds to acquire Wilson from Seattle in the 2022 offseason and rewarded him with a five-year, $245 million extension before he took a snap for the team, even though he had two years remaining on his contract.
Wilson never even made it to the new deal, getting cut after his second season with the Broncos. Wilson was paid about $124 million for his two seasons in Denver before signing with Pittsburgh for the minimum in 2024. Wilson counted for $53 million on the cap for the Broncos in 2024 and $32 million last season when Denver still managed to earn the No. 1 seed and make it to the AFC title game.
Tagovailoa wasn't the first high-profile quarterback to be told he would be cut this offseason despite a heavy cap charge. The Cardinals did it last week with Murray.
The former No. 1 overall pick in 2019 signed a five-year, $230.5 million extension in 2022 that still had $36.8 million in guaranteed money for 2026. Arizona is on the hook for that, as well as additional money from bonuses already paid, leading to the $54.7 million dead cap charge.
Ryan had been the longtime face of the Falcons when the team traded him to Indianapolis in 2022 after the relationship soured when the team made a run at acquiring Deshaun Watson.
Getting rid of Ryan came at a cost as the team had repeatedly pushed money from the five-year, $150 million extension he signed in 2018 into the future and had to account for it all in 2022.
After reaching the divisional round in the 2022 playoffs, the Giants rewarded Jones with a four-year, $160 million contract to keep him off the free agent market and used the franchise tag on star running back Saquon Barkley.
Both were gone in less than two years, with Barkley signing with Philadelphia the following offseason and leading the Eagles to a Super Bowl title, while Jones was cut midway through his second season. Jones had earned $36 million in 2024 at the time he was cut, with $11.1 million more hitting the cap as dead money, along with $22.2 million last season.
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FILE - Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray (1) throws a pass during the first half of an NFL football game against the Tennessee Titans, Oct. 5, 2025, in Glendale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri, File)
FILE - Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa runs off the field during the first half of an NFL football game against the New England Patriots in Foxborough, Mass., Jan. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, file)
