Ig Nobel Prizes leave the United States for the first time in 35 years, honoring cockroach milk and buried underpants

The Ig Nobel Prizes, the satirical counterpart to the Nobel Prizes that celebrates real scientific research "that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think," were awarded on September 3 at a ceremony in Zurich, Switzerland — the first time in the prize's 35-year history that the event has been held outside the United States.

The 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony took place at the Kongresshaus Zürich, a convention hall on the shore of Lake Zurich, in front of roughly 1,500 attendees. Genuine Nobel laureates, including economist Esther Duflo, physicist Michel Mayor and physiologist Tim Hunt, handed out the trophies in person, according to the official ceremony program published by Improbable Research, the organization that runs the awards. As is tradition, the audience pelted the stage with paper airplanes throughout the evening, and this year's theme — fungi — was marked with a new operatic song performed by a soprano and pianist, plus a costume dance number called "The Laboratory of Small Disasters."

Ten prizes, one recurring cockroach

Ten prizes were handed out across the usual span of disciplines. The Chemistry Prize went to a multinational team including Sanchari Banerjee, Nathan Coussens and François-Xavier Gallat, along with Leonard Chavas, now at DECTRIS Japan, and Subramanian Ramaswamy, now at Purdue University, for work establishing that milk proteins from the viviparous Pacific beetle cockroach, Diploptera punctata, pack roughly three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows. The finding traces back to a peer-reviewed study the team published in the journal IUCrJ, which used x-ray crystallography to solve the atomic-resolution structure of protein crystals grown inside the gut of a cockroach embryo — the only known cockroach species that nourishes its young with a milk-like secretion rather than laying eggs.

The Physics Prize was awarded to a team including Randy Hurd, Zhao Pan, Tadd Truscott and Kaveeshan Thurairajah for theoretical and experimental work toward designing a splash-free urinal. The Biology Prize went to researchers João Miguel Alves-Nunes and Adriano Fellone and colleagues, who studied why venomous snakes bite by, in the prize committee's description, "gently stepping on various parts of various venomous snakes — repeatedly, at various temperatures." A Biomechanics (Anthropology) Prize was given to a University of Oxford-linked group — Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot and Stuart West — for constructing a rigorous scientific definition of kissing precise enough to compare the behavior across ants, birds, polar bears and humans, and for using it to argue the practice may date back to interactions between early humans and Neanderthals.

Other winners included a Technology Prize for turning mosquito mouthparts into high-resolution 3D-printing nozzles, an Economics Prize for research finding that owners of expensive cars are more likely to snatch candy meant for children, an Olfaction Prize documenting that babies smell pleasant to their parents but teenagers generally do not, and a Peace Prize for research on why people value friends who are hostile toward their enemies. A Medicine Prize was awarded posthumously to the Japanese physiologist Tokuji Unno for a 1977 study on the aerodynamics of nose-blowing. The Soil Science Prize, drawing a Swiss-Dutch-German team led by Marcel van der Heijden and including Franz Bender, Atlant Bieri and Pia Viviani, went to researchers who buried 1,000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries and dug them up two months later to gauge soil biological activity from how much cotton fabric had decomposed.

Why the ceremony left the United States

The Ig Nobels have run continuously since 1991, staged for all 35 prior years at Harvard University, MIT or Boston University in the Boston area. That streak ended this year over concerns about the safety and visa access of the ceremony's international participants under the current U.S. immigration climate. Marc Abrahams, the prize's founder, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and longtime master of ceremonies, said the decision followed a year of mounting difficulty for winners and journalists trying to reach the U.S.

"During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country," Abrahams said. "We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year."

According to reporting from Boston public radio station WBUR, the move was announced in March 2026 and coincided with tightened U.S. visa and immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, which had already restricted some student and visitor exchange categories. WBUR noted that four of the ten winning teams had declined to travel to the U.S. for the previous year's ceremony, a warning sign organizers cited in deciding to relocate. Improbable Research organized the 2026 event in collaboration with Swiss academic institutions, and the organization has said the ceremony will now alternate among European cities rather than return automatically to Massachusetts.

Reaction from winners and coverage

Coverage of the ceremony was widespread among outlets that track the awards each year, including Scientific American, the Associated Press and CBS News, which noted that winning teams this year received a trophy newly redesigned as a hybrid of a mushroom and a human foot, tying into the ceremony's fungi theme. As in past years, the format combined a formal-looking awards presentation with deliberately undignified touches: each winner's short acceptance speech is cut off by a young girl, nicknamed "Miss Sweetie Poo," repeating "please stop, I'm bored" until the microphone is surrendered.

A companion event, "Ig Nobel Face-to-Face," was held the following afternoon at the University of Zurich, where the new laureates fielded questions from the public and from Hunt, one of the attending genuine Nobel laureates. The Ig Nobels remain distinct from, though frequently confused with, the actual Nobel Prizes awarded weeks later by Swedish and Norwegian committees; several Ig Nobel laureates over the decades have gone on to also win a real Nobel, most famously physicist Andre Geim, who won an Ig Nobel in 2000 for levitating a frog with magnets and a genuine Nobel Prize in Physics a decade later.

What happens next

Organizers have already set a location for next year: the 37th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony is scheduled for September 2027 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in Antwerp, Belgium, in partnership with the University of Antwerp. Improbable Research has indicated the prizes will continue to rotate among European venues for the foreseeable future rather than resume their old home in the Boston area, though the organization has not ruled out an eventual return to the United States if travel conditions for international scientists and journalists change. Nominations for the 2027 prizes, drawn as always from real, peer-reviewed research selected for its combination of absurdity and genuine scientific substance, are open on Improbable Research's website through the coming year.