Optimised urinals and buried underwear at 2026 Ig Nobels

The 36th annual Ig Nobel prizes, organized by the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research, celebrated quirky scientific projects on the heels of the real Nobel awards. This year's ceremony, held in Zurich, featured a shower of paper airplanes as researchers, some in costume, collected their foot-shaped, mushroom-covered trophies from Nobel laureates.

For the first time since 1991, the event took place in Switzerland due to safety concerns for guests traveling to the United States. The ceremony's opening saw a picture of former US President Donald Trump flash on the screen as researchers Justin Kruger and David Dunning were honored for their work demonstrating that uneducated individuals often overestimate their abilities.

Joao Miguel Alves-Nunes and his team from Sao Paulo University won the biology prize for repeatedly stepping on venomous snakes to study their biting behavior under various conditions. They conducted 40,000 tests on 116 snakes, and one rattlesnake managed to bite him despite his protective boots. Despite this, Alves-Nunes plans to extend his research to other countries.

In the physics category, four academics from China, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Canada received their prize for optimizing urinals. They designed a urinating machine with an anatomically accurate urethral nozzle to minimize splashback when people urinate on urinals. Kaveeshan Thurairajah, a doctoral student at the University of Waterloo, explained that this issue results in about one million liters of water being spilled daily in the US, causing significant cleaning costs.