Ig Nobel Awards Recognize Unconventional Scientific Research

<p>The Ig Nobel ceremony, which honors unusual but real scientific studies, took place in Zurich on September 5, 2026. The event was presented by the digital magazine, the Annals of Improbable Research.</p><p>This year marked the first time the awards were held outside the United States due to concerns regarding visa availability for honorees. The awards were founded in 1991.</p><p>Among the studies recognized were those examining cockroach milk, the evolutionary history of kissing, and methods for testing soil health using underwear. Other notable winners included researchers who found that upper-class individuals were more likely to engage in unethical behavior, such as stealing candy from a baby, as well as a study on proper nose blowing and research involving stepping on snakes to provoke them into biting.</p><p>Dr. Paul Piff, a social psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, commented on the findings regarding unethical behavior, stating, "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." He added, "Taking candy from children might be the least of our worries, but it’s emblematic of the tendency to prioritize one’s own needs over those of others."</p><p>The final four honorees included studies on the power of mutual enemies, attempts at creating a splash-free urinal, the use of dead mosquitoes for 3D printing, and research indicating that parents prefer the smell of their newborns to that of their teenage children.</p><p>The team studying the history of kissing defined it as "a non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer." Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, stated, "Next time you kiss someone, you can think, 'This is a 21.5 million-year-old tradition that I'm honoring here.'" She suggested that kissing likely has a useful evolutionary function and posited that Neanderthals may have engaged in kissing as well.</p><p>All honorees received a trophy resembling a combination of a mushroom and a human foot, while the audience threw paper airplanes at them during the ceremony. The Ig Nobel Awards are not related to the actual Nobel Prize, which will announce its honorees in October.</p><p><i>The Associated Press contributed to this report.</i></p>