Veteran of four wars, four enlistments, four branches: Air Force, Army, Army Reserve, Army National Guard. I am both an AF (Air Force) veteran and as Veteran AF (As Fuck)
Soil Science Prize — For burying 1,000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries and digging them up two months later to assess soil health.
One of the many delights of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in Zürich was happening just off to the side of the main stage.
From my seat in the balcony, I could see Keira Lee Rice standing stage right beside a large chalkboard. Each time a new Ig Nobel Prize was announced, Rice began to draw. She had only a few minutes. While the winners were being introduced and their wonderfully improbable research explained, lines appeared rapidly across the blackboard. About three minutes later, there it was: a finished drawing that somehow captured the essence—and the humor—of the research we had just heard about.
Rice is particularly well suited to the assignment because she belongs to both worlds represented by the Ig Nobels: science and art. She is a developmental biologist as well as an artist, and her association with the Ig Nobels began in 2024, at the ceremony at MIT, she experimented with live-illustrating each of the ten prize-winning achievements on a blackboard. The idea worked so well that live drawing crossed the Atlantic Ocean this year. Rice also created the evocative logo for the 2026 ceremony, the first held in Europe after 35 years in the United States.
Rice had to identify its central idea, find the joke hidden within it, translate all of that into a visual image, and then execute the drawing while the ceremony continued around her before the awardees left the podium.
Her pictures captured the spirit of the Ig Nobel Prizes themselves: research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. Rice managed to accomplish much the same thing—with chalk, a blackboard, and about three minutes.
I photographed every one of her finished drawings. Here are the other drawings:
Peace Prize — For documenting that people value friends who behave viciously toward people they dislike.
Olfaction Prize — For collecting evidence that babies smell wonderful to their parents—but teenagers do not.
Technology Prize — For pioneering “necroprinting”: using mosquito proboscises as high-resolution nozzles for 3D printing.
Physics Prize — For theoretical and experimental work aimed at designing a splash-free urinal.
Biology Prize — For repeatedly and gently stepping on venomous snakes, under varying conditions, to determine what does and does not provoke them to bite humans.
Medicine Prize — Awarded posthumously to Tokuji Unno for an aerodynamic study of how to blow the human nose.
Chemistry Prize— For discovering that milk proteins produced by viviparous cockroaches contain about three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows.
Economics Prize— For amassing evidence that upper-class people are more likely to take candy intended for children and engage in other forms of unethical behavior
Biomechanics Prize— For devising a more precise scientific definition of kissing by comparing kissing behavior in ants, birds, polar bears, and humans.
Researchers found that land use is a key factor in the decomposition of underwear, more so than other soil characteristics.Credit: Gabriela Brändle/Agroscope
The recognition and prestige of a Nobel prize for groundbreaking work comes with a gold medal and the equivalent of about US$1 million. The parody version, an Ig Nobel prize, devised to celebrate research that makes people laugh, and then think, might not deliver on the cash front, but it does bring considerable renown.
This year’s Ig Nobel prizes were awarded on 3 September at a ceremony in Zurich, Switzerland. They include a biomechanics prize for creating a precise definition of kissing, which works across species and excludes the transfer of food during the act1, a physics award that aims to please with experiments to design a splash-free urinal2 and a soil-science award for investigating what happens if you bury and then dig up 1,000 pairs of underwear3 (see ‘The 2026 Ig Nobel prizewinners in full’).
“I hope that, as well as finding the research amusing, people will come away thinking a little differently about our place in the animal kingdom,” says Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who was a co-author of the kissing study. “My jaw hit the floor when I got the phone call. It’s certainly one of my proudest life achievements.”
Smooching with Neanderthals
Brindle’s team steamily defined kissing as a “non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral–oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer”. According to this definition, polar bears, some birds and even ants kiss. What’s more, not only do other primates also snog each other, but the behaviour traces back around 21.5 million years to the ancestor of all the large apes, found the team. This means that ancient Homo sapiens would probably have been smooching Neanderthals.
“We’ve shown that animals kiss and when it could have evolved in the primates; the obvious next step is understanding why. If this award helps spark more curiosity about this sort of question, then that’s a pretty wonderful outcome,” says Brindle.
In the prize’s early days — it was launched in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, editor of the satirical magazine Annals of Improbable Research — receiving an Ig Nobel prize was deemed insulting by some, but now many researchers see the awards as a great career boost.
“The visibility they bring is enormous. It exposes research to audiences that would never otherwise encounter it,” says Changhong Cao, a mechanical engineer at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who 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 printing7.
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.
Another example of unpalatable items coming in handy is the work of Franz Bender and Marcel van der Heijden at the University of Zurich, who were the researchers responsible for the underwear-burial study. They enlisted community scientists from more than 25 nations to bury the garments and dig them up two months later, which provided insight into how biologically active the soil was.
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 incomes8.
CHEMISTRY
Sanchari Banerjee, Nathan Coussens, François-Xavier Gallat, Nitish Sathyanarayanan, Jandhyam Srikanth, Koichiro Yagi, James Gray, Stephen Tobe, Barbara Stay, Leonard Chavas and Subramanian Ramaswamy, for discovering that milk proteins from cockroaches that give birth to live young contain three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows9.
MEDICINE
The late Tokuji Unno, for the 1977 study called ‘How to Blow the Nose — An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing’10.
BIOLOGY
João Miguel Alves-Nunes, Adriano Fellone, Selma Maria Almeida-Santos, Carlos Roberto de Medeiros, Ivan Sazima and Otavio Augusto Vuolo Marques, for gently stepping on various parts of snakes to try to learn what induces a venomous snake to bite a human11.
PHYSICS
Randy Hurd, Zhao Pan, Tadd Truscott and Kaveeshan Thurairajah, for theoretical and experimental attempts to design a splash-free urinal2.
TECHNOLOGY
Justin Puma, Zhen Yang, Evan Johnston, Zixin Zhang, Xiaoyi Lan, Lingzhi Zhang, Hongyu Hou, Zixin He, Ali Afify, Megan Creighton, Jianyu Li and Changhong Cao, for pioneering the use of mosquito proboscises as high-resolution 3D printing nozzles, a process called necroprinting7.
OLFACTION
Ilona Croy, Tomasz Frackowiak, Thomas Hummel and Agnieszka Sorokowska, for collecting evidence that babies smell great to their parents, but teenagers do not12.
PEACE
Jaimie Arona Krems, Rebecka Hahnel-Peeters, Laureon Merrie, Keelah Williams and Daniel Sznycer, for documenting that people value friends who are mean to those that they dislike13.
SOIL SCIENCE
Franz Bender, Marcel van der Heijden, Atlant Bieri and Pia Viviani, for burying 1,000 pairs of underwear in more than 25 nations and digging them up two months later3.
Like candy from a baby
Other awards this year include the physics prize for a team that experimentally validated what makes fluid splash back from urinals and suggested redesigns that could cut the spray to just 1.4% of what is commonly experienced.
The work was inspired by observations after using urinals while wearing sandals and khaki pants, says study co-author Zhao Pan, a fluids physicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who suggests names for the new designs that include ‘Nauti-Loo’, ‘Cornucopeea’ and ‘Urine-no’.
Meanwhile, the economics prize went to experimental work by Paul Piff, a social psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues, who showed that wealthy people are more likely to engage in unethical behaviour than are people on lower incomes8.
“We found that wealthier participants were more likely to cut off pedestrians, lie at work and cheat in games to win small sums of money,” says Piff. “In one study, we set out a bowl of candy that was explicitly identified as being reserved for kids. Lo and behold, wealthier individuals took significantly more candy from children.”
Crossing the Atlantic
For the first time in the 36-year history of the Ig Nobel awards, the ceremony was held outside the United States because of the nation’s crackdown on visas and immigration. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA,” Abrahams explained on the website for the competition earlier this year. “It has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country.”
The change didn’t dampen the spirits of the attendees. Amid the traditional shower of paper planes, prizes in the shape of a giant mushroom were handed to winners by Nobel laureates, including economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee.
“I love the Ig Nobel Prizes,” says Pan. “Many Ig-Nobel-winning projects grow out of a good question and genuinely out-of-the-box thinking, not expensive equipment, massive resources or complicated methods. They’re fun, and more importantly, they make people think and learn.”
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02650-x
References
Brindle, M., Talbot, C. F. & West, S. Evol. Hum. Behav.47, 106788 (2026).
The trip from Lancaster PA a trip to NYC is easiest taking one Amtrak train. That train arrives in about three hours.
A much cheaper alternative involves taking Amtrak, SEPTA and NJ Transit with a total trip time close to five hours.
The difference, of course, is price. But my most recent trip to NYC showed me the difference can change by more than $150 in minutes.
The Amtrak train from Lancaster to NYC averages around $60 but on weekends and peak periods it can approach $200 one way. Seniors get a 10% discount.
The slower trip costs $45 dollars for an adult. Seniors over 65 who have a SEPTA senior card can make the whole trip for $20. $10 for Amtrak, $10 for NJT, free on SEPTA.
While the price is fixed on the slow trains, Amtrak has a variable pricing policy. If you can plan ahead, tickets are often cheaper two weeks or more in advance, $30 to $50.
But the best discounts are right up to the time of boarding. On a recent trip I bought a ticket from Lancaster to Philadelphia for $11 and planned to take SEPTA and NJT to NYC. The trip would have been almost five hours and cost $20.
As the first train approached Philadelphia, I opened the Amtrak app and searched for trains to Trenton. The day before all trains for that 30-mile trip were between $100 and $120. The Amtrak ticket for the next train suddenly dropped to $13. I bought the ticket. I checked for Trenton to NYC, those tickets were close to $150.
Then five minutes after we left Philadelphia station I searched again. Still expensive. Then as we approached Trenton I searched once more: $18 to NYC for the next train. I bought that ticket.
Instead of $20 for the trip I paid $42 but arrived almost two hours sooner. Amtrak trains are more comfortable.
If you have the time, take the slow train. But check along the way. Maybe Amtrak will cut the price by 80% or more just before the next train leaves.
I had the opportunity to tour the French Academy of Sciences with Christian Amatore, who is himself a member of the Academy, and his wife Marie-France. Christian took me through several of its meeting rooms, the library, and most impressively the great meeting space beneath the oval interior dome. The surroundings seem appropriate for an institution whose history reaches back to Louis XIV.
The oval dome appears round outside.
The Académie des sciences was founded in 1666 through the efforts of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s powerful minister. Colbert gathered mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, anatomists, botanists, zoologists and chemists to promote scientific investigation and advise the government. The first meeting took place on December 22, 1666, in the king’s library. In 1699 Louis XIV formally reorganized it as the Académie royale des sciences and gave it quarters in the Louvre.
The Academy soon became one of Europe’s great centers of science. Its members investigated everything from astronomy and mathematics to chemistry and natural history. Its scientists participated in famous expeditions to measure the shape of the Earth, and in 1790 the National Assembly entrusted the Academy with helping establish a unified system of weights and measures—work that contributed to the metric system.
The French Revolution interrupted this history. In 1793 the revolutionary Convention abolished all the academies. Two years later the Institut de France was created, and the scientific academy eventually emerged within the new institutional structure.
The magnificent building the Academy occupies today has a separate history. Cardinal Mazarin provided in his will for the creation of the Collège des Quatre-Nations, intended to educate young men from four territories recently incorporated into France. Construction began in the 1660s under Louis Le Vau, one of the great architects of seventeenth-century France, who also worked on the Louvre and Versailles. The college opened in 1688.
Its most recognizable feature is the dome facing the Seine and the Louvre. What appears from outside to be a circular dome is oval inside—a remarkable architectural effect. The room beneath it was originally the college chapel and was intended to contain Mazarin’s tomb. After Napoleon moved the Institut de France into the former college in 1805, architect Antoine Vaudoyer transformed the chapel into the great assembly hall beneath the cupola.
Bibliothèque Mazarine
The library is another link to Mazarin. His great collection was transferred to the Collège des Quatre-Nations in the seventeenth century and survives as the Bibliothèque Mazarine, today containing some 600,000 documents, including thousands of manuscripts and incunabula.
Today the Palais de l’Institut houses France’s five academies. Beneath the dome, academicians continue a tradition extending across revolutions, empires, republics and more than three and a half centuries.
Marie-France and Christian in the meeting hall under the dome
Walking through those rooms with Christian Amatore made that history unusually tangible. The Academy is not simply a monument to France’s scientific past. Nearly 360 years after Colbert assembled that first group of scientists, it remains a place where scientists meet, argue, exchange ideas and try to understand the world.
The official histories are available from the Académie des sciences and the Institut de France's history of the Palais.
