The 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes were handed out Sept. 3 at Zurich's Kongresshaus, the first time in the awards' 36-year history that the ceremony has been held outside the United States, organizers said, citing safety concerns for traveling winners and journalists, as Chemical & Engineering News reported.
The prizes, awarded by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research for studies that "first make people laugh, and then make them think," went to ten projects this year. Researchers Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot and Stuart West took the biomechanics prize for developing a precise scientific definition of kissing across species, while a chemistry prize went to a team including Sanchari Banerjee and Nathan Coussens for finding that cockroach milk proteins pack roughly triple the energy density of cow's-milk proteins.
The physics prize honored Randy Hurd, Zhao Pan, Tadd Truscott and Kaveeshan Thurairajah for designing and testing splash-free urinal prototypes, and a Swiss-led soil science team — Franz Bender, Marcel van der Heijden, Atlant Bieri and Pia Viviani — won for burying underwear in soils around the world to measure how quickly microbes broke it down, a real technique agronomists use to gauge soil health, according to Nature.
This year's ceremony carried a fungi theme, and the honors were presented, as tradition dictates, by real Nobel laureates — economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, astrophysicist Michel Mayor and biochemist Tim Hunt among them — who by all accounts stayed good-humored handing out awards for research into nasal-exhalation aerodynamics and a mosquito-proboscis 3D-printing technique nicknamed "necroprinting," per Improbable Research, the prize's organizer.
Underneath the jokes, the Ig Nobels have a track record of pointing at genuinely useful science — several past winners have gone on to earn actual Nobel Prizes — and this year's crop, however odd on the surface, mostly answers real questions in soil ecology, comparative biology and the everyday physics of a public restroom.