Atlant Bieri made this video about his experience on the day he and his team were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize. The 2026 Ig Nobel Soil Science Prize was awarded to Franz Bender, Marcel van der Heijden, Atlant Bieri, and Pia Viviani, for burying 1000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries, and then digging them up after two months.
They documented their work, in these publications:
- “Assessing Soil Health with Underpants,” S. Franz Bender and Marcel G.A. van der Heijden, Science, vol. 387, no. 6737, 2025, pp. 936-936.
- “Soil Health Assessment Using Buried Cotton Underpants with the Help of 1000 Citizen Scientists,” S. Franz Bender, et al., Plants, People, Planet, 2026.
The 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony happened on September 3, 2026, at Kongresshaus in Zurich, Switzerland, with an audience of 1500 in the room, and possibly countless others watching the live webcast.