Polish Scientist Wins Ig Nobel for Baby and Teen Smell Research

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The news in Polish

1. odbyć się
   miało miejsce, zostało zorganizowane w określonym czasie i miejscu ↩︎
2. badaczka  (f.)
   kobieta, która prowadzi naukowe badania i analizuje różne zjawiska ↩︎
3. zapach  (m.)
   właściwość substancji wyczuwalna przez nos, woń ↩︎
4. niemowlę  (n.)
   bardzo małe dziecko, które jeszcze nie potrafi mówić ani chodzić ↩︎
5. nastolatek  (m.)
   młoda osoba w wieku od trzynastu do dziewiętnastu lat ↩︎
6. ceremonia  (f.)
   oficjalne, uroczyste wydarzenie odbywające się według określonego porządku ↩︎

Translation

Text comprehension

Question 1: Where were the 2026 Ig Nobel Awards held?

Question 2: What did Professor Sorokowska’s team discover about the smell of teenagers?

Vocabulary

Polish	English
odbyć się	to take place
badaczka  (f.)	researcher
zapach  (m.)	smell
niemowlę  (n.)	infant
nastolatek  (m.)	teenager
ceremonia  (f.)	ceremony

Read the full story

The 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded at a ceremony held outside the United States for the first time in the awards’ history. The event took place in Zurich, Switzerland, with the organisers citing safety concerns for international laureates and journalists travelling to the US as the reason for the move, according to editor-in-chief Marc Abrahams.

The prizes are awarded by the humorous scientific journal Annals of Improbable Research. Winners received a figurine of a foot covered in mushrooms — the theme of this year’s ceremony — along with a 100-trillion-dollar Zimbabwean banknote, worth roughly 0.4 US dollars in total.

A Polish researcher, Professor Agnieszka Sorokowska, led the team that won the Ig Nobel in the olfactory category. Their study found that babies smell wonderful to their parents, but teenagers do not.

Other prizes covered a wide range of unusual research. The economics award went to Paul K. Piff and colleagues for finding that people from higher social classes are more likely to take sweets intended for children than those from lower classes. The chemistry prize went to a team that discovered proteins in the milk of viviparous cockroaches are three times more energy-rich than those in cow’s milk.

Japan’s Tokuji Unno received the medicine prize posthumously for an aerodynamic study of how to blow one’s nose. The biology prize honoured researchers who pressed on various parts of venomous snakes to determine what causes a snake to bite a human. The physics prize went to a team that theoretically and experimentally attempted to design a urinal that prevents splashing.

Further awards recognised a team that used mosquito mouthparts as nozzles for high-resolution 3D printing, a study showing that we value friends who are hostile towards people we dislike, and research in which scientists buried 1,000 pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries and dug them up two months later to study soil health.

The prizes were presented by Nobel Prize laureates. Next year’s ceremony will take place in Antwerp, Belgium.