Meet the 2026 Ig Nobel Prize winners

To laugh, then to think The annual award ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and “24/7″ lectures. Ig Nobel Master of Ceremonies Marc Abraham. Credit: YouTube/Improbable Research Ig Nobel Master of Ceremonies Marc Abraham. Credit: YouTube/Improbable Research It’s that time of year again, when we learn which lucky scientists are among the winners of the Ig Nobel Prizes. This year, the prizes honor research on designing the perfect splash-free urinal; using mosquito proboscises to “necroprint” tiny nozzles; studying composition rates of buried cotton underwear; and the aerodynamics of a healthy nose-blow, among other highlights. Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and “24/7 lectures,” whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words. Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website. After 35 years in Boston, the annual prize ceremony will take place in Zurich, Switzerland, this year and will continue to be held in a European city for the foreseeable future. The reason: concerns about the safety of international travelers, who are increasingly reluctant to travel to the US to participate. Four of last year’s 10 winners opted to skip the ceremony rather than travel to the US, and the situation has not improved. “During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of The Annals of Improbable Research magazine, told The Associated Press in March. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the US this year.” Next year’s ceremony will be held in Antwerp, Flanders. The Ig Nobels will return to Zurich in 2028 and every even-numbered year after that. “In that respect, it will be a little like the Eurovision Song Contest with a base in Europe,” said Abrahams, who founded the Ig Nobels and serves as emcee during the annual ceremony. Without further ado, here are the winners of the 2026 Ig Nobel prizes. Biomechanics Credit: Warner Bros. Credit: Warner Bros. Citation: Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot, and Stuart West for devising a more precise definition of kissing—“non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer”—in ants, birds, polar bears, and humans. You’d think it would be relatively straightforward to define the act of kissing. At least one study defined it as involving “protruded lips and suction movement.” But Brindle et al. argue that this is not a helpful definition from an evolutionary standpoint, since it merely describes the physical movements common to human beings. They prefer a less anthropocentric definition—after all, some form of mouth-to-mouth contact can be seen across the animal kingdom—one that includes oral-oral contact “with some movement of the lips,” but does not include things like mouth-to-mouth feeding behavior or, say, dogs licking their owners’ lips. Hence, they produced the rather convoluted definition in the citation above. With that definition in hand, the authors concluded that most large apes engage in some form of kissing, although the researchers lacked the data to determine how many times kissing has been involved in Afro-Eurasian monkeys and apes. Eastern gorillas, however, seem to have lost that evolutionary feature at some point. And the authors concluded that our Neanderthal ancestors also engaged in kissing. As for why and how kissing evolved, that will be the subject of future research, although the researchers note there is some evidence that kissing in a sexual context may increase mating success—and every species in which kissing evolved also engages in premastication. Economics Credit: NurPhoto via Getty Credit: NurPhoto via Getty Citation: Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, for amassing evidence that upper-class people are more likely to snatch from a children’s supply of candy, and engage in other kinds of unethical behavior. Does one’s social status have any bearing on a given person’s tendency to engage in unethical behavior? To find out, the authors conducted seven related studies to examine this issue from multiple angles. For example, one field study assessed whether upper-class drivers (as adjudged by the type of car driven) were more or less likely to cut off other vehicles at a busy four-way intersection. Another one looked at whether such drivers were more likely to cut off pedestrians at a crosswalk. Yet another study tested whether subjects in a lab-based setting were more or less likely to help themselves to wrapped candies intended for children in another lab—a test of entitlement. And so forth. Again and again, the upper-class participants proved more likely and willing to engage in various kinds of unethical activity, whether it be cutting off cars or pedestrians, taking candy from babies, or lying about their scores in a series of random dice rolls. They were also more likely to view greed as a positive attribute. That said, the authors also acknowledged the likelihood of exceptions: there are several notable examples of philanthropic and/or ethical wealthy individuals, for example, and past research has shown a correlation between concentrations of poverty and violent crime. Still, their experiments do suggest that “the pursuit of self-interest is a more fundamental motive among society’s elite,” they concluded. Chemistry Citation: Sanchari Banerjee, Nathan Coussens, François-Xavier Gallat, Nitish Sathyanarayanan, Jandhyam Srikanth, Koichiro Yagi, James Gray, Stephen Tobe, Barbara Stay, Leonard Chavas, and Subramanian Ramaswamy for discovering that milk proteins from viviparous cockroaches pack three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows. I confess that I was unaware that one species of cockroach (Diploptera punctata) in particular has the ability to nourish its embryos directly by producing milk during development in the brood sac wall, a type of reproduction known as “viviparity.” This has the benefit of substantially cutting down the time scale for the embryos to reach full maturity. There is a bit of yolk in the earliest stages, which the embryos use until they develop throat muscles and a gut, at which point they gorge themselves on a protein-rich liquid milk secreted by the brood sac. Once ingested, the liquid milk crystallizes in the gut. The authors extracted milk crystals from the guts of D. punctata roach embryos harvested from a brood sac and then performed X-ray diffraction experiments, augmented with free-electron lasers, to determine the protein structure of the crystals—achieving atomic-level resolution. They found that just one roach embryo crystal contained more than three times the energy of an equivalent amount of dairy milk because of its tightly packed crystalline lattice structure, which allows a higher concentration of food to be stored. “This unique storage form of nourishment for developing embryos allows access to a constant supply of complete nutrients,” they concluded. That’s yet another reason why cockroaches will likely inherit the Earth. Medicine Credit: Polygram Filmed Entertainment Credit: Polygram Filmed Entertainment Citation: The late Tokuji Unno, for the study called “How to Blow the Nose—An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing” This study is almost entirely in Japanese, and the translated abstract is lacking in detail. But Unno was cognizant of cultural differences between Europeans and Japanese people when it comes to proper nose-blowing and wanted to quantify key aspects of the practice “to give good instructions to those who do not understand how to blow the nose.” It’s honestly not a bad idea, since blowing one’s nose incorrectly, or over-enthusiastically, has been known to lead to sinus infections—and in one rare memorable case, a woman who fractured her left eye socket. Unno used a pair of pneumotachometers (instruments to measure volume flow of respired gases) in parallel for his experiments to determine the velocity, volume, and time scale of blowing through each side of the nose over 60 trials. He also used a balloon catheter connected to a pressure transducer to monitor pressure changes in the auditory canal. He concluded that the faster the “expiratory thrust” of the blow, the more efficiently one can expel any mucus, and pressure changes in the ear canal were not high enough in his experiment to carry a high risk of ear infection. Unno concluded that “a big and long nose blow is therefore recommended to prevent upper and lower respiratory tract diseases.” Biology Citation: João Miguel Alves-Nunes, Adriano Fellone, Selma Maria Almeida-Santos, Carlos Roberto de Medeiros, Ivan Sazima, and Otavio Augusto Vuolo Marques, for gently stepping on various parts of various venomous snakes—repeatedly, at various temperatures at various times of day—to try to learn what does and does not induce a venomous snake to bite a human.