Ig Nobel Prize: UVC light sterilizes shoes, kills odor

Summary

How smelly shoes inspired India's Ig Nobel prize-winning studySoutik BiswasIndia correspondentGetty ImagesA survey found more than half the respondents had felt embarrassed by their own shoes or someone else's stinkAlmost 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.Vikash Kumar, 42, assistant professor of design at Shiv Nadar University outside Delhi, taught Sarthak Mittal, 29, during his undergraduate years. It was at the university that the two first hit upon the idea of studying smelly shoes.Mr Mittal says he often noticed his hostel corridors were lined with shoes, often left outside twin-sharing rooms. The initial idea was simple: why not design a sleek, aesthetic shoe rack for students? But as they dug deeper, the real culprit emerged - it wasn't clutter but the foul smell that was driving the footwear outdoors."It wasn't about space or a lack of shoe racks - there was plenty of room. The problem was frequent sweating and the constant use of shoes that made them smelly," says Mr Mittal, who now works for a software company.So the two embarked on a survey in the university hostels asking a truly human question: if our sneakers reek, doesn't that ruin the entire experience of using a shoe rack?Vikash Kumar (left) and his former student Sarthak Mittal won the deep dive into stinky shoesTheir survey of 149 university students - 80% of them male - confirmed what most of us already know but rarely admit: more than half had felt embarrassed by their own shoes or...