Ig Nobel Prizes Honor Research Using Buried Underpants to Test Soil Health

Awarded on September 3, 2026, at a ceremony in Zurich, Switzerland, this year’s Ig Nobel prizes celebrate quirky scientific research designed to make people laugh and then think. The international honors recognized unconventional studies involving buried underwear, animal kissing definitions, and mosquito-powered 3D printing.

For decades, the Ig Nobel prizes have celebrated scientific investigations that initially sound absurd but ultimately reveal serious truths. Founded in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, editor of the satirical magazine Annals of Improbable Research, the awards ceremony takes place annually. While the parody prizes do not come with the million-dollar cash equivalents of their famous counterparts, they offer substantial public visibility and renown for researchers willing to look beyond conventional academic boundaries. In the prize’s early days, receiving an Ig Nobel prize was deemed insulting by some, but now many researchers see the awards as a great career boost.

Franz Bender and Marcel van der Heijden

Buried Underpants and Soil Quality Across the Globe

Among this year’s honorees, researchers Franz Bender and Marcel van der Heijden from the University of Zurich claimed a soil-science prize for an extensive citizen-science project. Their study, Assessment of Soil Health Using Buried Cotton Underpants and with the Participation of 1,000 Citizen Scientists, enlisted participants from more than 25 nations to bury standard garments and dig them up two months later. 1,000 Schweizerinnen und Schweizer verbuddelten dafür Baumwollunterhosen im Garten, auf dem Feld oder auf Wiesen.

The physical state of the recovered fabric served as a biological indicator. According to the findings, the decomposition rate reveals how many active microorganisms reside in the dirt, demonstrating that land use is a key factor in the decomposition of underwear, more so than other soil characteristics. Jede und jeder, der davon hört, fragt sich zunächst, wieso Unterhosen? Damit haben wir das Interesse geweckt noted Bender regarding the unconventional method, emphasizing that Forschung und Spaß müssen sich nicht ausschließen.

Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot, and Stuart West

Defining Cross-Species Kissing and Ancient Ancestry

The biomechanics category also drew international attention for inquiries into animal behavior. An evolutionary biology team at the University of Oxford earned recognition for devising a precise definition of kissing that applies across species.

Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot, and Stuart West were recognized for devising a precise definition of kissing. Brindle and her co-authors classified the act as a non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral–oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer. This exact framework establishes that polar bears, some birds, and even ants kiss, while tracing the behavior back approximately 21.5 million years to the ancestor of all the large apes. Brindle remarked that she was completely stunned when she received the phone call and that it was certainly one of her proudest life achievements, adding that the discovery suggests ancient Homo sapiens would probably have been smooching Neanderthals.

Ilona Croy

Olfactory Perceptions in Human Relationships

Photo: nature.com

In the realm of psychology and perception, Ilona Croy and her clinical psychology research group at the University of Jena received honors for investigating the influence of the sense of smell on interpersonal relationships. Their study documented how parents increasingly lose appreciation for their children’s natural body odor as the children age, confirming that infants smell good, while teenagers do less so.

Croy noted that handling sweat samples retrieved from deep freezers naturally appeared absurd to outsiders, yet the research addresses serious biological questions regarding hormonal development and human bonding. Rather than undermining academic rigor, the recognition highlights what Croy describes as curiosity, a joy of experimenting, and, ideally, a certain measure of craziness.

Changhong Cao

Repurposing Mosquito Mouthparts for Technology

The 2026 awards further highlighted how seemingly unpleasant biological mechanisms can translate into technological advancements. Changhong Cao, a mechanical engineer at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, is part of the team that won this year’s technology prize for showing that a mosquito’s mouthparts can be repurposed as a nozzle for high-resolution, low-cost 3D printing. Cao says that the work shows that even things that people find unpleasant can turn out to be useful — sometimes in the most unexpected way.

Additional awards included an economics prize for Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner for amassing evidence that wealthy people are more likely to engage in unethical behavior than are people with lower incomes. Together, the winners underscore the enduring philosophy of the Ig Nobel tradition: using unexpected inquiries to celebrate research that makes people laugh, and then think.