The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, a brand-new award, is a conscious attempt to sprinkle a similar kind of stardust onto engineering, which has long worried that it is seen as a bit of a poor relation to more academic science. At a half-hour ceremony held on March 18th at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, the prize committee honoured Marc Andreessen, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn and Louis Pouzin, all of whom were instrumental in the development of the modern internet. The Swedish-style pomp and circumstance will come on June 25th, when the queen will host the winners at Buckingham Palace. (London’s various universities, alas, have yet to announce any kind of student-run after-party.)

While the prominence of the Nobels makes them excellent publicity for the fields they honour—chemistry, physics and physiology or medicine, not forgetting the less scientific endeavours of economics, literature and peace—they miss out large swathes of science. The result (see chart) has been a proliferation of similar prizes in other fields, many of which are quite open about their intent to mimic the Nobels.

Computer scientists, for instance, aspire to the A.M. Turing Award. The 2012 award, announced on March 13th, went to Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mathematicians have the Fields Medal, given every four years to particularly brilliant researchers under the age of 40. They also have the better-remunerated Abel prize (this year’s winner, announced on March 20th, is Pierre Deligne of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton). Other awards are more catholic.Japan hosts the Asahi and Kyoto prizes, for instance, which honour outstanding contributions in any area of science, alongside prizes for the arts.

Some of the newest prizes on the block come from Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire, who has attempted to upstage the Nobels by offering $3m to each winner, nearly three times what the Nobel Foundation pays. The Fundamental Physics Prize, given by Mr Milner’s foundation, has so far honoured nine people. As The Economist went to press, the next batch was being announced at a ceremony in Geneva (see economist.com/physicsprize for news of the winners). A similar Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, this time a joint effort between Mr Milner, Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google), his wife Anne Wojcicki (who founded 23andMe, a genetics-testing firm) and Mark Zuckerberg (who started Facebook), honoured 11 winners, and paid them each another $3m, in February.

Despite the deep pockets of Mr Milner and his friends, the Nobels still rule the roost when it comes to prestige. But financial muscle is not the only way an award can differentiate itself from the competition. The satirical Ig Nobel prize, established in 1991 by an American magazine called the Annals of Improbable Research, has honoured investigations into, among other topics, the spermicidal properties of Coca-Cola and the pain-relieving effects of vigorous swearing. But there is often a serious point, too: the Ig Nobels aim to celebrate research that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think”.

Last year, for instance, an Ig Nobel was won by a group of neuroscientists who had put a dead salmon in a brain scanner and showed it some pictures. They demonstrated something that looked a lot like electrical activity in the fish’s brain—a gentle reminder to their fellow researchers to beware of false positives in the fashionable and tricky field of brain-imaging.