Sep 16, 2026 · 24 min · 9 segments
Chris, Stu and Linden discuss the winners of this year's Ig Nobel prizes, from simultaneously soiled underpants to milky cockroaches. This is the 36th year of the awards celebrating science that make…
Hello, yes, you're listening to Lost in Science, and we are talking the Ig Nobel Prizes for research that makes you laugh and that makes you think.
Stu, what made you laugh and made you think this year?
Look, I mean, the idea of assessing soil health with underpants was probably one of the ones which I think it almost sums up the improbability of the research that gets considered for the Ig Nobel Prizes.
Which is great, getting lots of people involved.
Yeah, and it was all around the world.
The researchers buried a thousand identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries, and then they dug them up to see how decomposed they were, basically.
And the reason for it, which is, you know, it sounds ridiculous.
They're burying underpants.
It's the underpants gnomes.
But no, it's actually looking at the microbiome of the soil by how decomposed the underpants were in different locations, in different countries, in different soils.
So the use of underpants, I guess, was possibly that they were easy to access in those 25 different countries to get the same... identical pair of underpants um and then they were buried in different conditions and they were you know evaluated for their decomposition and how fast they decayed in the different soils but um yeah you know i i just think the idea of using underpants to measure soil health that is that is the epitome of of uh ignobel science right there
presumably they had to be clean
They were brand new.
Yes, they were brand new.
I'm sure worn underpants would have a different microbiome already in the underpants.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, that's a real confounding variable, that one.
There were quite a few stories.
I mean, these prizes are all excellent, right? But the one that probably has the strongest Australian connection was the Ig Nobel Peace Prize this year that was won by a team of American researchers, including an Australian US dual citizen, Keila Williams.
This was a paper that was studying the traits that we like in our friends, and this research paper...
That's the other thing about these Ig Nobel's, right? The translation between the research paper title and what the paper's actually about.
In this case, the paper title's very clear.
Sometimes we want vicious friends.
Hello, yes, you're listening to Lost in Science, and we are talking the Ig Nobel Prizes for research that makes you laugh and that makes you think.
Stu, what made you laugh and made you think this year?
Look, I mean, the idea of assessing soil health with underpants was probably one of the ones which I think it almost sums up the improbability of the research that gets considered for the Ig Nobel Prizes.
Which is great, getting lots of people involved.
Yeah, and it was all around the world.
The researchers buried a thousand identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries, and then they dug them up to see how decomposed they were, basically.
And the reason for it, which is, you know, it sounds ridiculous.
They're burying underpants.
It's the underpants gnomes.
But no, it's actually looking at the microbiome of the soil by how decomposed the underpants were in different locations, in different countries, in different soils.
So the use of underpants, I guess, was possibly that they were easy to access in those 25 different countries to get the same... identical pair of underpants um and then they were buried in different conditions and they were you know evaluated for their decomposition and how fast they decayed in the different soils but um yeah you know i i just think the idea of using underpants to measure soil health that is that is the epitome of of uh ignobel science right there
presumably they had to be clean
They were brand new.
Yes, they were brand new.
I'm sure worn underpants would have a different microbiome already in the underpants.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, that's a real confounding variable, that one.
There were quite a few stories.
I mean, these prizes are all excellent, right? But the one that probably has the strongest Australian connection was the Ig Nobel Peace Prize this year that was won by a team of American researchers, including an Australian US dual citizen, Keila Williams.
This was a paper that was studying the traits that we like in our friends, and this research paper...
That's the other thing about these Ig Nobel's, right? The translation between the research paper title and what the paper's actually about.
In this case, the paper title's very clear.
Sometimes we want vicious friends.
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