Ig Nobel prizes honour urinals and buried underwear

The 2026 Ig Nobel prizes honoured projects including urinals designed to prevent splashing, underwear buried to test soil quality and experiments involving researchers stepping on venomous snakes.

The 36th edition of the annual awards, organised by the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research, was held in Zurich late Thursday. It was the first time the event had been held outside the United States since it began in 1991.

Organisers said in March that they moved the ceremony to Switzerland because they feared it had become “unsafe for our guests to visit the country”. International academics have reported travel problems to the United States since President Donald Trump's second term began in January 2025.

A physics prize went to academics from China, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Canada for research aimed at optimising urinals. Kaveeshan Thurairajah, a doctoral student at the University of Waterloo in Canada, said the team built a urinating machine with an “anatomically accurate urethral nozzle” to study splashback.

A University of Zurich team won the soil science prize for a project in which volunteers buried thousands of pairs of men's underwear in gardens for two months so researchers could analyse mould growth.

The biology prize went to Joao Miguel Alves-Nunes's team for work on when venomous snakes decide whether to bite. Alves-Nunes, from Sao Paulo University, said he carried out 40,000 tests on 116 snakes, including one rattlesnake that bit him through protective boots.

The economics prize went to a team represented by Paul Piff, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, for experiments that found people from privileged backgrounds were more likely to take candy marked as intended for children.

Esther Duflo, winner of the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize, presented the economics award and said the prizes “should make us laugh, and then make us think”.