The Ig Nobel Prizes, the annual awards for research that “makes people laugh, then think”, have left the United States for the first time. The 36th ceremony took place on Thursday evening, September 3, at the Kongresshaus in Zurich, after 35 years in the US, most recently in Boston.
Ten teams were honoured, each receiving the usual handmade trophy, this year a sculpture that looks like a cross between a mushroom and a human foot. Behind the jokes are real, peer-reviewed studies on questions most scientists never think to ask.
Why the ceremony moved to Switzerland
The organisers, the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, said in March that they would hold the event in Europe because of visa and travel concerns. Marc Abrahams, the event’s founder and master of ceremonies, told the Associated Press that “it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country”. Nearly half of the 2025 winners did not travel to the Boston ceremony. The plan now is to alternate between Zurich and other European cities, with Antwerp in Belgium hosting in 2027.
The 2026 winners
- Biomechanics: Matilda Brindle and Stuart West of the University of Oxford and Catherine Talbot of the Florida Institute of Technology, for working out a scientific definition of kissing and tracing its evolutionary history. Their January 2026 paper defines a kiss as friendly mouth-to-mouth contact with some lip movement and no transfer of food.
- Economics: Paul Piff and colleagues, for a 2012 study suggesting that people from wealthier backgrounds are more likely to behave unethically, including taking sweets meant for children. Nobel laureate Esther Duflo presented the prize.
- Chemistry: a team that analysed milk produced by a live-bearing cockroach and found its proteins hold about three times the energy of proteins in cow’s milk.
- Medicine: the late Dr Tokuji Unno, for a 1977 study of the aerodynamics of nose-blowing. His advice: breathe in moderately, blow hard, and clear one nostril at a time.
- Biology: João Miguel Alves-Nunes of the University of São Paulo and colleagues, who gently stepped on venomous snakes, some 40,000 times across 116 animals, to learn what makes them bite. The study was later retracted over questions about its animal-ethics approval.
- Physics: Tadd Truscott, Zhao Pan, Kaveeshan Thurairajah and Randy Hurd, for building a urinating machine with an anatomically accurate nozzle and using it to design a urinal that does not splash back.
- Technology: researchers who used the mouthparts of dead mosquitoes as ultra-fine nozzles for 3D printing, a method they call “3D necroprinting”.
- Olfaction: a 2017 study finding that parents enjoy the smell of their babies but not of their teenagers.
- Soil science: a Swiss-led team that buried 1,000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries for up to two months, then examined them to gauge how active the soil life was in each place. “The idea was to make soil science visible,” one member said.
- Peace: Jaimie Krems of the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues, for showing that people often value friends who dislike the same people they do.
Funny, but useful
Several of the winning projects have practical uses. The urinal research targets a real cost: Thurairajah noted that cleaning bathrooms is “very expensive”. The underwear experiment, which relied on volunteers burying the test pairs in their own gardens, gave scientists a simple way to compare soil life in very different places.
The move to Europe has not changed the spirit of the event. Its organisers say there are no immediate plans to return to the United States, and next year’s winners will collect their prizes in Antwerp.
Sources
- Smithsonian Magazine — Here are the winners of the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes
- Associated Press via Boston 25 News — Scientists studying cockroach milk and nose-blowing win Ig Nobel prizes
- The Star (AFP) — Optimised urinals, buried underwear and snakes galore at the 2026 Ig Nobel
- Improbable Research — The 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony