Candy stealing, nose blowing and splash-free urinals. The Ig Nobel awards are back

Zurich’s Fungi-Themed Night Celebrated Ten Unconventional Scientific Endeavors

Earthguardiansonline.com – The 36th annual Ig Nobel ceremony unfolded in Zurich, Switzerland, on Thursday, September 3, 2026, under a theme that might surprise anyone expecting solemnity: fungi. Ten research projects spanning disciplines from aerodynamics to evolutionary biology received recognition for work that, in the words of the organizing body, is designed to “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” The event, staged as a deliberate parody of the Nobel Prizes, was produced by the publication Annals of Improbable Research and drew an audience that witnessed both the now-iconic ritual of hurling paper airplanes into the rafters and a newly composed operatic number about mushrooms, sung by actual Nobel laureates in full fungal costume.

What the Ig Nobels Actually Reward

Far from being a mere joke, the Ig Nobel framework exists to draw public attention toward research that challenges conventional assumptions about what science looks like. The projects honored this year ranged from studying how venomous snakes decide to strike when a human steps on specific body regions, to engineering questions about fluid dynamics in urinal design. Each award corresponds to a traditional Nobel category — physics, chemistry, medicine, economics, technology, biomechanics, and others — but the subject matter tends to sit well outside the corridors of conventional academic prestige.

The Economics and Chemistry Winners

In the economics category, a study examining social behavior around confectionery found statistical evidence that individuals from upper socioeconomic strata were more inclined to take sweets from a child’s stash and to commit other forms of minor ethical transgression. The chemistry prize went to researchers who demonstrated that milk produced by cockroaches packs roughly three times the caloric energy density of bovine milk — a finding with potential implications for understanding insect physiology and, perhaps, alternative nutrient sources.

Medicine, Biomechanics, and the Aerodynamics of a Simple Act

The medicine award recognized a paper titled “How to Blow the Nose — An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing,” which applied fluid-mechanics principles to what most people perform without a second thought. In the biomechanics category, researchers tracing the evolutionary origins of human kissing earned recognition for work that connects a common social gesture to deeper questions about species behavior and mate selection.

“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.”

Those remarks came from Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in England and co-author of the kissing-evolution study. Her comments underscore a recurring tension in modern research funding: the pressure to justify every grant application in terms of near-term commercial or technological payoff, even when the question being asked is fundamentally about understanding how the natural world works.

Physics, Technology, and the Mosquito Nozzle

The physics prize went to engineers who tackled the perennial problem of splash-back in public urinals, applying principles of fluid dynamics to redesign fixtures so that users remain dry. The technology award recognized a process the authors termed “necroprinting,” in which the proboscis — the feeding tube — of a dead mosquito was repurposed as a micro-scale nozzle for three-dimensional printing. The work demonstrated that biological structures, once dismissed as mere curiosities, can inform manufacturing at scales where conventional tooling struggles.

“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.”

Changhong Cao, associate professor in the department of mechanical engineering at McGill University in Canada and co-author of the necroprinting study, told the audience that such awards “help legitimize … exploratory thinking.” His point resonates with a broader argument in research policy: that serendipity and lateral thinking, not just targeted engineering, drive breakthroughs.

Why the “Silly” Science Matters

Carly Anne York, an associate professor of biology at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina, who was not connected to this year’s ceremony, offered an external perspective on why the Ig Nobels continue to matter. York, author of the book The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog: And Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science, noted that the awards “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.”

York pointed to a statistic that often goes unmentioned in public debates about research budgets: roughly half of all economic growth in the United States can be traced back to discoveries originating in basic, curiosity-driven research — work that had no commercial application in sight when it began. She suggested that the mosquito-mouth model celebrated in Zurich could, in some future iteration, inspire a gentler method of delivering pharmaceuticals to patients.

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

The fungi-themed evening in Zurich thus served a dual purpose. On the surface, it was a night of operatic mushroom costumes and paper-airplane chaos. Beneath that, it was a reminder that the scientific enterprise depends on protecting space for questions that have no obvious market value — questions about how a nose blow works, why a kiss evolved, or what happens when you step on a snake’s tail. The Ig Nobels, for all their theatrical flair, keep that space visible to the public.