🤧 Blow one nostril at a time. Take a small breath in first, then push the air out over a longer stretch rather than in one sharp burst. That was the conclusion two Japanese ear, nose and throat doctors reached in 1977. 49 years later, in September 2026, their paper won the Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine. Neither author was on the stage to collect it. And the ceremony itself had just left the United States.

Two airflow meters and 15 noses

The winning paper is titled How to Blow the Nose - An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing. It ran in 1977 in the bulletin of the Oto-Rhino-Laryngological Society of Japan, and it was written by Tokuji Unno and Hiroshi Yajima, who were both in the otolaryngology department at Wakayama Medical University at the time. The medicine prize went to the two of them.

The starting point may feel closer to home for readers outside Japan than they expect. According to the press release Asahikawa Medical University issued on September 4, the study grew out of a simple irritation: the habit differs considerably between Westerners and Japanese, so is anyone actually doing it properly?

Fifteen men aged 14 to 48 sat with two pneumotachometers, devices that measure airflow, running in parallel, and the team repeatedly recorded the speed, volume and duration of the air leaving each nostril. A balloon catheter in the ear canal logged pressure changes at the same time. All 15 subjects, as it happens, already blew one nostril at a time by habit.

Blowing both sides at once splits the airflow, and the volume moving through each nasal passage drops. Pressing the clearer nostril shut raises the speed through the blocked side; the paper records a case where doing so lifted the flow rate roughly fivefold. Inhaling a little first and then exhaling over a longer stretch, rather than in one short blast, shifts more of the secretions. Blowing correctly, the authors add, also helps clear what has settled in the lower airways, the bronchi included.

49 years on, what stayed the same and what moved

The one-nostril rule did not move. A patient handout supervised by Dr. Sawako Masuda of the National Hospital Organization Mie Hospital lists blowing one nostril at a time as the first item in its guide. A board-certified ENT specialist at Shinseikai Toyama Hospital, who reread the paper the day after the prize was announced, likewise endorses the step of pressing the opposite nostril closed so air passes through the more congested side. The advice to blow slowly and for longer is unchanged too.

What moved is the question of force. The Asahikawa Medical University press release sums up one of the paper's conclusions as: it is fine to blow hard. The paper itself recorded positive pressure changes in the ear canal on 25 of 60 single-side blows, and then reasoned that changes of that size do not ordinarily cause acute middle ear infection. The material handed to patients today says not to blow too hard. From the same measurements, the wording given to patients has become the more cautious one. Anyone with nose or ear trouble should see a clinician.

The Ig Nobel Prizes go to achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think. Marc Abrahams founded them in 1991, and they are organised by the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research; they are not a way of mocking the work that wins.

The man who accepted it was someone else

Tokuji Unno was born in 1933. He graduated from the Chiba University school of medicine, moved into otolaryngology at Wakayama Medical University, and the prizewinning paper dates from those early-career years. In 1976 he became the founding professor of the otolaryngology department at Asahikawa Medical University, and later a professor emeritus there. His field was respiratory physiology, covering everything from ordinary breathing to coughing, sneezing and speech. He died in August 2022, aged 89.

The person who walked onto the stage in Zurich was Dr. Miki Takahara, the third professor to hold that chair and a man who trained under Unno as a young doctor. Speaking to the TV Asahi network, Takahara relayed what Unno's widow had told him. She said, he recalled, please accept this honour and go and receive the prize on my husband's behalf.

About the other laureate, Hiroshi Yajima, Asahikawa Medical University writes in its press release that it has not been able to confirm his current contact details. Somewhere in the 49 years between publication and the prize, one author died and the other became untraceable. The time it takes for research to be noticed and the time a person has were never running on the same clock.

The year the ceremony left America

The Ig Nobel ceremony had been held in Cambridge and Boston for 35 straight years, since the first one in 1991, with a Harvard University hall serving as the venue for most of that run. Then, in March 2026, the organisers announced they were moving the event to Europe. The 36th ceremony took place on September 3 at the Kongresshaus Zurich in Switzerland.

Announcing the move, Abrahams told The Associated Press, in an email interview, that the country had over the past year become "unsafe for our guests to visit." He added that he could not "in good conscience" ask that year's winners, or the reporters who cover the ceremony, to fly to the United States. He told US public radio NPR that at the previous ceremony only six of the 10 winners made it. The other four, NPR reported, did not want to travel because of concerns about unpredictable immigration and visa handling.

The move has not been framed as a one-off. The organisers have already announced the 37th ceremony for September 5, 2027, in Antwerp, Belgium. The stand-in for this year's medicine prize flew from Asahikawa to Zurich to collect it.

What 20 straight years is made of

Japanese researchers have now won in 20 consecutive years. The 2024 physiology prize went to work showing that many mammals can take up oxygen through the intestine. The 2025 biology prize went to a study finding that cows painted with zebra-like stripes are less attractive to biting flies. The streak makes the news every year.

This year's entry, though, is a paper from 1977. It comes with a 10 trillion Zimbabwe dollar note and a trophy that this year took the form of blue cheese with a toadstool-covered foot rising out of it, handed over by actual Nobel laureates. The note stopped being legal tender long ago, so its cash value is essentially nil.

Nose blowing has local manners. In Japan, doing it audibly in front of other people is largely avoided, and sniffing tends to be the polite alternative. In much of the West it runs the other way, and sniffing is the thing that grates. That is what the 1977 paper snagged on in the first place. So: in your country, is it one nostril at a time? And is doing it in public acceptable at all?

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