Stealing Candy From Children, Splash-Proof Urinals and Buried Panties, Oh My! Here Are the Winners of the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes
The awards are an unaffiliated spoof of the Nobel Prizes. They highlight research achievements that are surprising and silly-sounding—but also make people think
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You’re probably familiar with the Nobel Prizes, some of the most prestigious awards. While the world eagerly awaits who will earn those prizes this year, some researchers are currently celebrating the winners of playful—yet still scholarly—parody awards: the Ig Nobel Prizes, which were announced on September 3.
Organized by the company Improbable Research, the spoof awards were designed to “honor achievements so surprising that they make people laugh, then think,” per their website. Winning work highlighted during the 36th annual award ceremony included hilarious research on the aerodynamics of nose blowing, gently stepping on venomous snakes, confirming that teenagers do indeed smell worse than babies and other side-splitting scientific undertakings.
“This year’s award winners took seemingly far-fetched ideas and turned them into legitimate research projects,” Carly Anne York, an animal behaviorist and physiologist at Lenoir-Rhyne University, tells CNN’s Jack Guy. “And yes, these are legitimate scientific endeavors.” York was not involved with the Ig Nobels, but she has spotlighted funny scientific work in her book The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog: And Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science.
Here are the projects that won the ten categories of the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes.
While kissing might sound like an easy dynamic to describe, the winners of the Ig Nobel Biomechanics Prize came up with a precise definition: “a non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer.” The explanation was included in a study published in the January 2026 issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
“My jaw hit the floor when I got the phone call” about the award, Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in England who worked on the research, tells Nature’s Chris Simms. “It’s certainly one of my proudest life achievements.”
In the study, “we’ve shown that animals kiss and when it could have evolved in the primates,” she says. “The obvious next step is understanding why. If this award helps spark more curiosity about this sort of question, then that’s a pretty wonderful outcome.”
Underwear buried to test soil quality and urinals scientifically designed to prevent splashing were among the projects honoured as the Ig Nobel prizes again put a spotlight on the quirky side of science.
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) September 4, 2026
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An older study—with more alarming findings—won the Ig Nobel Economics Prize. In 2012, researchers reported that higher-class individuals are more likely to engage in unethical behaviors, like taking candy meant for children. Wealthier individuals were also more likely to lie at work and cheat during games.
“The general pattern seems to be that with wealth and rising power, you become less engaged with the needs of others and less burdened by the needs of social relationships,” study co-author Paul Piff, a social psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, tells the Guardian’s Ian Sample.
The recipients of the Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize, however, conducted research concerning much smaller individuals: cockroaches. In a 2016 study, scientists found that milk proteins from a species of cockroach that gives live birth carry three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows.
Speaking of bodily fluids, research on nose-blowing won the Ig Nobel Medicine Prize. A study published in 1977 investigated the aerodynamics of clearing your nostrils and determined that the best technique involves a moderate inhalation followed by a powerful blow, reports the Japan Times’ Spencer Landers. What’s more, each nostril should be blown individually.
Quick fact: No longer held in the U.S.
This year’s Ig Nobel Prize award ceremony took place in Zurich, Switzerland, and marked the first time it was held outside of the United States. The decision was made after almost half of last year’s winners chose not to attend the ceremony at Boston University over concerns about traveling to the U.S.
The Ig Nobel Biology Prize, however, involves an action most people want to avoid: stepping on a venomous snake. Scientists gently put their feet on different areas of venomous snakes under various conditions to figure out what triggers the slithering creatures to bite humans. The research, published in 2024, was later retracted because of claims that the team breached the animal ethics approval granted to them.
In a less contentious practical study, the winners of the Ig Novel Physics Prize tried to design a splash-free urinal in a 2025 study.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a urinal and wore sandals; you sometimes feel those droplets,” Tadd Truscott, a fluid dynamicist at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia who co-authored the work, tells Ari Daniel on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” “They could be yours; they might be your neighbor’s. Well, the idea was to stop that completely.”
The winners of the Ig Nobel Technology Prize were also trying to solve an annoying problem: the lack of tiny, high-resolution nozzles for 3D printing. To do so, this team wasn’t just inspired by nature—they incorporated it. They turned mosquito mouthparts, or proboscises, into fine-scale nozzles in a manufacturing technique they dubbed “3D necroprinting.” They described the work last year.
Meanwhile, the Ig Nobel Olfaction Prize went to researchers who, in 2017, reported that parents think their babies smell amazing, but not so much for their teenagers.
A personal hygiene product surprisingly played a role in the project that won the Ig Nobel Soil Science Prize. In a 2025 study, researchers buried 1,000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries—and left them there for up to two months. Digging up the unmentionables revealed the biological activity of each region’s soil.
And in a study that revealed more about the inner workings of the human mind, researchers found that we often value friends who are vicious to others we don’t like. The 2023 study earned the team the Ig Nobel Peace Prize.
“Sometimes we want our friends to be more vicious and indifferent when they interact with our enemies,” study co-author Jaimie Krems, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, tells the Guardian. “I’ve felt, in many instances, incredibly loved when people have carried my hate for me and been willing to have my back.”
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