How smelly shoes inspired India's Ig Nobel prize-winning study

 

Charts are true utterly

With a precision that can stun

- Martha Wescott

 

Almost every household has at least one pair of shoes whose odour is impossible to ignore. Multiply that by a family's worth of footwear, stack them on a rack, and you have a domestic design problem that's as pungent as it is universal. Two Indian researchers decided this wasn't just about stink - it was about science. They set out to study how foul-smelling shoes shape our experience of using a shoe rack, and in doing so, stepped into the hallowed - and hilarious - halls of the Ig Nobel Prize, a tongue-in-cheek award for silly but inventive scientific endeavour.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpq51xp4e91o

 

Newcomers to astrology are often amazed by the details that the standard techniques of astrology can glean from mundane charts. Here is one such example. 

The 2025 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony took place on September 18, 2025, at 6:00 PM EST (10pm UTC) Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts. The article covers the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize in Engineering, awarded to Indian researchers Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal for their study on the effects of smelly shoes on shoe rack design.

 

Here is the chart for the Cancer ingress of the Sun drawn for Boston. The Sun and Jupiter are placed on the cusp of the 6^th house (linked with hygiene as well as domestic appliances that are purchased to ease day to day living) amid stars Propus and Tejat in the feet of the Twins (see image). On the descendant of the ingress chart is the Rotten Egg Nebula (also known as the Calabash Nebula, OH 231.8+4.2) - a protoplanetary nebula in Puppis Its ecliptic longitude is [1leo]. Diana Rosenberg links this area with “bad odors” (v.1, p.466)

 

Now if we progress the chart to Sept 18, the combination Sun-Jupiter reaches the Asc thereby triggering the entire combination.