Buried underpants and a new definition of kissing win 2026 Ig Nobel prizes

The Ig Nobel prize is the real Nobel's joker sibling: the winning work must first make you laugh, then make you think. Crucially these are published, peer-reviewed studies, not spoofs. On 3 September 2026 the ceremony left the US for the first time in 35 years and moved to Zurich.

The headline prize, in soil science, went to a team that buried 1,000 pairs of cotton underpants in more than 25 countries and dug them up two months later. The faster they rot, the more living activity — bacteria, fungi, worms — the soil holds; it is already a cheap field test farmers use as "Soil Your Undies". The biomechanics prize went to researchers who produced a precise cross-species definition of a kiss (mouth-to-mouth contact, no food transfer), letting them trace kissing's evolutionary history among primates.

Other winners: cockroach milk carrying three times the energy of cow's milk; a posthumous medicine prize for a 1977 aerodynamic study of nose-blowing; gently stepping on venomous snakes to learn what provokes a bite; evidence that babies smell wonderful to parents but teenagers do not. Andre Geim, who won an Ig Nobel in 2000 for levitating a frog, won a real Nobel for graphene in 2010. Curiosity justifies itself.

Source: Nature, nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02650-x.