他们把几千条内裤埋进二十五个国家的土里：这项研究拿了今年的搞笑诺贝尔奖

Picture this first.

On the evening of September the third, fifteen hundred people were sitting in a hall in Zurich, Switzerland.

Every one of them had a paper aeroplane pinched between their fingers.

Each time a winner's name was read out on stage, the paper aeroplanes flew out together.

The people handing over the prizes were several genuine Nobel laureates.

The prize money is ten trillion — old banknotes from a country that voided them long ago, and today they would not buy a cup of water.

This is the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.

The prize has exactly one rule: make people laugh first, then make them think.

It gives out ten awards a year; every one sounds absurd, and behind every one is real, published research.

The most talked-about one this year involves underpants.

A team bought several thousand pairs of pure cotton white underpants and buried them in the ground.

Across twenty-five countries and over a thousand sites, they buried them by the same method.

After two full months, they went back and dug them up one by one, and weighed them.

It sounds like a prank, but it is a very clever way of measuring something.

Here is the logic.

Soil holds vast numbers of microbes invisible to the eye, and they break down organic matter without stopping.

Cotton is organic matter.

The healthier the soil, the more active the microbes, and the faster the cotton fibre gets eaten.

Dig them up two months later: if only a few threads remain, this ground is full of life.

If the underpants are still basically intact, the biological activity in this ground is very low.

The great advantage of the method is that it is cheap.

Measuring soil microbial activity normally means a laboratory, instruments, money.

A pair of underpants costs a few coins, and any farmer can bury them, dig them up and look for himself.

A design that looks like a joke is solving a genuinely practical problem.

Several of this year's other prizes follow exactly the same pattern.

One team studied the body odour of infants and teenagers; the conclusion was that parents generally find babies pleasant to smell, and teenagers not.

Another analysed the composition of cockroach "milk" and found its protein carries three times the energy density of cow's milk.

And a group of physicists used fluid dynamics to work out the shape of a urinal that does not splash back.

Every one of them makes you laugh first.

And every one of them makes you add: that does actually seem useful.

Someone will ask: does making jokes about science make people trust science less?

The organisers' answer has never changed.

They say what gets laughed at was never the research itself.

What gets laughed at is the assumption we carry that only serious questions deserve to be studied.

A pair of underpants buried in the ground and an expensive instrument are measuring the same thing.

There is one more change this year worth mentioning.

For the past thirty-five years, the prize was always held in America.

This year, for the first time, it moved to Europe.

A prize famous for American humour has moved to a country famous for its rigour.

That fact by itself has something of the Ig Nobel about it.

Think about it: when did you last hear something, laugh out loud, and then a moment later find yourself thinking it actually makes sense?