Wild Science Awards Go Overseas: Underwear Burial, Cockroach Milk Win Big

Meet the Ig Nobel prizes — the awards that celebrate science at its most bizarre. This year, ten research teams picked up these quirky trophies for work that might make you laugh and then think. The topics ranged from cockroach milk to the surprisingly complex act of blowing your nose. Yep, someone actually studied what happens when you grab a tissue.

For the first time in 35 years, the ceremony packed its bags and left the United States. The event landed in Zurich, Switzerland at a convention center. Why the sudden move? Marc Abrahams, who runs the whole show and edits a magazine called Annals of Improbable Research, explained that America has become unsafe for international guests. Getting visas turned into a nightmare, so Europe became the new home for this gathering of scientific oddballs.

The trophy looks like something between a mushroom and a human foot. Yeah, it's weird, but that fits the vibe perfectly. Among the winners were Matilda Brindle and Stuart West from Oxford University, plus Catherine F. Talbot from the Florida Institute of Technology. Their claim to fame? Tracing the evolutionary story of kissing. Another award went to the late Dr. Tokuji Unno, who dedicated his work to understanding nose-blowing from a scientific angle.

One team took the cake for creativity. They buried 1,000 pairs of underwear across more than 25 countries just to see how soil creatures would break them down. Gross? Maybe. Scientifically valuable? Apparently so. As for the audience, they stuck to tradition by folding paper airplanes and launching them toward the stage. Because why not?

Looking ahead, the organizers want to keep moving between European cities. Antwerp in Belgium will host the 2027 edition. For now, there's no word on whether the ceremony will ever return to American soil, where it previously bounced between Harvard, MIT, and Boston University. The real Nobel Prizes drop in early October for those seeking traditionally serious science.