Various pieces of handmade netting or woven fabric hanging on a wooden frame outdoors against a cloudy sky and tall green grass in the background.

Researchers found that land use is a key factor in the decomposition of underwear, more so than other soil characteristics.Credit: Gabriela Brändle/Agroscope

The recognition and prestige of a Nobel prize for groundbreaking work comes with a gold medal and the equivalent of about US$1 million. The parody version, an Ig Nobel prize, devised to celebrate research that makes people laugh, and then think, might not deliver on the cash front, but it does bring considerable renown.

This year’s Ig Nobel prizes were awarded on 3 September at a ceremony in Zurich, Switzerland. They include a biomechanics prize for creating a precise definition of kissing, which works across species and excludes the transfer of food during the act1, a physics award that aims to please with experiments to design a splash-free urinal2 and a soil-science award for investigating what happens if you bury and then dig up 1,000 pairs of underwear3 (see ‘The 2026 Ig Nobel prizewinners in full’).

“I hope that, as well as finding the research amusing, people will come away thinking a little differently about our place in the animal kingdom,” says Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who was a co-author of the kissing study. “My jaw hit the floor when I got the phone call. It’s certainly one of my proudest life achievements.”

Smooching with Neanderthals

Brindle’s team steamily defined kissing as a “non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral–oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer”. According to this definition, polar bears, some birds and even ants kiss. What’s more, not only do other primates also snog each other, but the behaviour traces back around 21.5 million years to the ancestor of all the large apes, found the team. This means that ancient Homo sapiens would probably have been smooching Neanderthals.

“We’ve shown that animals kiss and when it could have evolved in the primates; 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,” says Brindle.

Levitating frogs

Previous winners of Ig Nobel prizes have included researchers who studied the preferred pizza toppings of rainbow lizards (Agama agama) in Togo4, the levitation of live frogs using magnets5 and research showing that London taxi drivers have particularly large hippocampi in their brains6.

In the prize’s early days — it was launched in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, editor of the satirical magazine Annals of Improbable Research — receiving an Ig Nobel prize was deemed insulting by some, but now many researchers see the awards as a great career boost.

“The visibility they bring is enormous. It exposes research to audiences that would never otherwise encounter it,” says Changhong Cao, a mechanical engineer at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who is part of the team that won this year’s technology prize for showing that a mosquito’s mouthparts can be repurposed as a nozzle for high-resolution, low-cost 3D printing7.

Cao says that the work shows that even things that people find unpleasant can turn out to be useful — sometimes in the most unexpected way.

Another example of unpalatable items coming in handy is the work of Franz Bender and Marcel van der Heijden at the University of Zurich, who were the researchers responsible for the underwear-burial study. They enlisted community scientists from more than 25 nations to bury the garments and dig them up two months later, which provided insight into how biologically active the soil was.

The 2026 Ig Nobel prizewinners in full

BIOMECHANICS

Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot and Stuart West, for devising a precise definition of kissing1.

ECONOMICS

Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton and Dacher Keltner, for amassing evidence that wealthy people are more likely to engage in unethical behavior than are people with lower incomes8.

CHEMISTRY

Sanchari Banerjee, Nathan Coussens, François-Xavier Gallat, Nitish Sathyanarayanan, Jandhyam Srikanth, Koichiro Yagi, James Gray, Stephen Tobe, Barbara Stay, Leonard Chavas and Subramanian Ramaswamy, for discovering that milk proteins from cockroaches that give birth to live young contain three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows9.

MEDICINE

The late Tokuji Unno, for the 1977 study called ‘How to Blow the Nose — An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing’10.

BIOLOGY

João Miguel Alves-Nunes, Adriano Fellone, Selma Maria Almeida-Santos, Carlos Roberto de Medeiros, Ivan Sazima and Otavio Augusto Vuolo Marques, for gently stepping on various parts of snakes to try to learn what induces a venomous snake to bite a human11.

PHYSICS

Randy Hurd, Zhao Pan, Tadd Truscott and Kaveeshan Thurairajah, for theoretical and experimental attempts to design a splash-free urinal2.

TECHNOLOGY

Justin Puma, Zhen Yang, Evan Johnston, Zixin Zhang, Xiaoyi Lan, Lingzhi Zhang, Hongyu Hou, Zixin He, Ali Afify, Megan Creighton, Jianyu Li and Changhong Cao, for pioneering the use of mosquito proboscises as high-resolution 3D printing nozzles, a process called necroprinting7.

OLFACTION

Ilona Croy, Tomasz Frackowiak, Thomas Hummel and Agnieszka Sorokowska, for collecting evidence that babies smell great to their parents, but teenagers do not12.

PEACE

Jaimie Arona Krems, Rebecka Hahnel-Peeters, Laureon Merrie, Keelah Williams and Daniel Sznycer, for documenting that people value friends who are mean to those that they dislike13.

SOIL SCIENCE

Franz Bender, Marcel van der Heijden, Atlant Bieri and Pia Viviani, for burying 1,000 pairs of underwear in more than 25 nations and digging them up two months later3.

Like candy from a baby

Other awards this year include the physics prize for a team that experimentally validated what makes fluid splash back from urinals and suggested redesigns that could cut the spray to just 1.4% of what is commonly experienced.

The work was inspired by observations after using urinals while wearing sandals and khaki pants, says study co-author Zhao Pan, a fluids physicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who suggests names for the new designs that include ‘Nauti-Loo’, ‘Cornucopeea’ and ‘Urine-no’.

Meanwhile, the economics prize went to experimental work by Paul Piff, a social psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues, who showed that wealthy people are more likely to engage in unethical behaviour than are people on lower incomes8.

“We found that wealthier participants were more likely to cut off pedestrians, lie at work and cheat in games to win small sums of money,” says Piff. “In one study, we set out a bowl of candy that was explicitly identified as being reserved for kids. Lo and behold, wealthier individuals took significantly more candy from children.”

Crossing the Atlantic

For the first time in the 36-year history of the Ig Nobel awards, the ceremony was held outside the United States because of the nation’s crackdown on visas and immigration. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA,” Abrahams explained on the website for the competition earlier this year. “It has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country.”

The change didn’t dampen the spirits of the attendees. Amid the traditional shower of paper planes, prizes in the shape of a giant mushroom were handed to winners by Nobel laureates, including economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee.

“I love the Ig Nobel Prizes,” says Pan. “Many Ig-Nobel-winning projects grow out of a good question and genuinely out-of-the-box thinking, not expensive equipment, massive resources or complicated methods. They’re fun, and more importantly, they make people think and learn.”