Research into nose blowing, candy stealing and splash-free urinals honored at 2026 Ig Nobel awards

By Jack Guy, CNN

(CNN) — Think of scientific research and you may picture white lab coats, microscopes or arrays of high-end equipment — but the reality is sometimes very different.

Around the world, scientists are working in less stereotypical environments on unusual research projects, such as gently stepping on different parts of a venomous snake, to work out what exactly will make the animal bite a human.

That is just one of 10 pieces of research honored Thursday at the Ig Nobel awards, which exist to shine a spotlight on the kind of scientific achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think,” according to a statement from the organizers.

The ceremony for the 36th edition of the annual awards took place in Zurich, Switzerland, on Thursday, with “fungi” the theme of this year’s event.

Designed as a spoof of the Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobels are organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research.

As well as the now-traditional throwing of paper airplanes, attendees were also treated to a performance of a new operatic song about fungi, performed by Nobel laureates dressed as mushrooms.

Other award-winning projects include research that found “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,” which won the economics prize, and another that discovered that cockroach milk contains three times as much energy as that of cow’s milk, which took home the chemistry prize.

Then there was the winner of the medicine category, a study called “How to Blow the Nose — An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing.”

Meanwhile, a study about the evolutionary history of kissing won its authors the biomechanics prize. That study’s co-author, Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, England, told CNN: “Science has been under attack for a while now, and fields that are less obviously aligned with commercial industry and technology are increasingly deemed to be less important.”

“Of course, applied research is vital, but it would be a grave loss if we stopped looking at the world around us and asking ‘why?’. Curiosity for its own sake is fundamental to how science moves forward,” Brindle added.

Research into how to design splash-free urinals scored the physics prize, while work that used mosquito proboscises as 3D printing nozzles, a process described as “necroprinting,” won its authors the technology prize.

Changhong Cao, co-author of the necroprinting study and associate professor at the department of mechanical engineering, McGill University, in Canada, said the awards “help legitimize … exploratory thinking.”

“Nobody sets out planning to build a 3D printing nozzle from a mosquito. We got there by paying close attention to something that seems irrelevant, and staying open to where it leads,” Cao told CNN.

Carly Anne York, an associate professor of biology at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina, who was not involved in the awards, told CNN that the Ig Nobels “never fail to highlight research that makes you ‘laugh, and then think.’”

“From dirty underpants for soil science to 3D mosquito models, this year’s award winners took seemingly far-fetched ideas and turned them into legitimate research projects. And yes, these are legitimate scientific endeavors,” said York, who authored “The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog: And Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science.”

“While this research might sound frivolous at first, approximately half of all economic growth in the US can be traced back to discoveries made from basic research,” she added.

“Who knows — the 3D model of a mosquito mouth could be the inspiration for a new, painless mode of administering medications,” York said.

“What we do know, however, is that gaining knowledge is never a frivolous endeavor, no matter how silly the topic may seem.”

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