How many hairs are in a human nose? Until a few years ago, nobody had published a solid answer. So a team at the University of California, Irvine, counted them one by one in each nostril of 20 donated bodies.
The tally came out remarkably even, about 120 hairs per nostril, and earned the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine. The nose has stayed in the Ig Nobel spotlight. In September, the 2026 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize, awarded in Zurich, went posthumously to Japanese physician Tokuji Unno for a 1977 aerodynamic study of how to blow the nose. But the nose-hair count had a serious purpose. It was meant to help people with an autoimmune condition that can strip away the nose's first line of defense.
