The Ig Nobel Prize, the annual parody of the Nobel Prize that rewards research built to first make people laugh and then make them think, held its 2026 ceremony in Zurich, Switzerland, instead of its usual home at Harvard. It's the first time in the prize's 35-year history that the ceremony left the United States — and founder Marc Abrahams says it isn't going back.

The reason wasn't scientific. Abrahams told the Associated Press it had "become unsafe for our guests to visit the country," and that he couldn't "in good conscience" ask this year's winners or the international journalists covering them to fly into the US. It wasn't a guess: four of last year's ten winners already skipped the ceremony rather than make the trip. A prize whose whole point is being lighthearted needed a genuinely serious reason to change address.

Going forward, the ceremony will rotate through European cities, returning to Zurich every even year — Antwerp hosts in 2027. Abrahams compared the new arrangement to "the Eurovision Song Contest, with a base in Europe." The science stayed just as odd: this year's winners included a team that engineered a splash-free urinal by copying the angle dogs use to pee, and researchers who buried 1,000 pairs of underwear in 25 countries to measure soil health.

Why it matters: even a 35-year-old celebration of harmless, laugh-first science wasn't insulated from how much harder the US has become to enter for international visitors this year.

Source: https://arstechnica.com