MTN Weekend: The serious science hiding inside the Ig Nobel Prizes
On Thursday evening in Zurich, 1,500 people marked the opening of the 2026 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony by hurling paper aeroplanes towards the stage, where four genuine Nobel laureates would later present ten decidedly unconventional scientific prizes.
There was an orchestra featuring an accordion, didgeridoo, alphorn and yodeller. Scientists had to explain their subjects first in 24 seconds and then in seven words. The ceremony’s theme was fungi, for no immediately obvious reason.
Welcome to the Ig Nobel Prizes.
Behind the theatrical absurdity lies a serious argument about science: useful discoveries do not always begin with questions that sound important.
What are the Ig Nobel Prizes?
The Ig Nobel Prizes have celebrated achievements that “first make people laugh, then make them think” since 1991. The 2026 ceremony was the first to take place outside the United States, after 35 events in the Cambridge and Boston area.
This year’s winners included researchers who studied the evolutionary history of kissing, the aerodynamics of nose-blowing and whether parents really think babies smell better than teenagers.
The awards are sometimes described as prizes for ridiculous science. That misses the point. Many of the honoured studies have appeared in peer-reviewed journals and address questions their authors considered genuinely worth investigating.
The laughter comes from the subject. The thinking begins when you examine the method.
3D necroprinting turns a mosquito into a manufacturing tool
The 2026 Ig Nobel Technology Prize went to researchers who found a new use for one of nature’s least popular pieces of precision engineering: the female mosquito’s proboscis.
Microscale 3D printing requires exceptionally narrow nozzles, which can be expensive, fragile or difficult to manufacture. Mosquitoes already possess a structure designed to transport liquid through an extremely narrow channel.
Using laboratory-reared, uninfected and dead mosquitoes, the researchers removed the outer sheath of the proboscis and attached the remaining structure to a conventional dispensing tip. Their custom printer produced lines approximately 20 micrometres wide: finer than those created by commonly used commercial metal dispensing tips.
The team printed honeycomb and maple-leaf structures, as well as tiny scaffolds containing living cancer cells and red blood cells. It called the process “3D necroprinting”.
The name is almost guaranteed to provoke a reaction. Yet the experiment belongs to a serious field of engineering: using biological materials as functional components instead of merely copying their design.
It also raises an intriguing question. When evolution has already created a highly specialised structure, do engineers always need to manufacture another one from scratch?
Splash-free urinals become a fluid-dynamics problem
Where the mosquito researchers found a ready-made solution in nature, another team turned to mathematics to redesign an object hiding in plain sight.
The 2026 Ig Nobel Physics Prize went to researchers who used high-speed experiments, mathematical modelling and differential equations to design urinals that reduce splashback.
It sounds like a problem conceived late at night in a student bar. It is also an everyday fluid-dynamics challenge affecting hygiene, cleaning and accessibility.
Splash occurs when a stream strikes a surface at an unfavourable angle. The researchers calculated that splashback falls sharply when the impact angle is kept at or below approximately 30 degrees. They then used differential equations to create curved urinal designs that maintain a low angle for people of different heights.
The result is more than a novelty bathroom fixture. It demonstrates how mathematical modelling can improve an object whose basic design has gone largely unquestioned for generations.
Many problems persist not because they are impossible to solve, but because they appear too mundane to deserve serious attention.
Buried underwear makes soil activity visible
The next winners used no advanced manufacturing or differential equations. Their scientific instrument cost little more than a multipack from a department store.
For the Ig Nobel Soil Science Prize, researchers recruited 1,000 volunteers across Switzerland to bury more than 2,000 pairs of cotton underwear in gardens, fields and meadows. Two months later, the underwear was retrieved, photographed and analysed alongside soil samples.
Cotton is largely composed of cellulose, which soil organisms decompose. The more material that disappeared, the more biologically active the soil tended to be.
Decomposition alone is not a complete measure of soil health. Soil quality also depends on properties including structure, nutrients, organic matter and water retention, while maximum decomposition is not desirable in every ecosystem. The researchers therefore compared the underwear with soil analyses and information about how the land was being used.
The results showed that land use was the strongest influence on decomposition rates. The project also created one of Switzerland’s most extensive datasets on soil life, with around 240 citizen scientists listed as co-authors of the resulting paper.
Its other achievement was making an invisible process visible. A waistband attached to fabric full of holes tells a more immediate story than a spreadsheet of laboratory measurements.
Why cockroach milk is not coming to your supermarket
If buried underwear provided the year’s most accessible scientific instrument, the Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize produced its most irresistible headline: cockroach milk contains more energy than cow’s milk.
The actual research was both narrower and more interesting. Diploptera punctata, the only known cockroach species that gives birth to live young, nourishes its developing embryos with a milk-like secretion. After the embryos consume it, the proteins crystallise inside their midguts, storing protein, carbohydrates and lipids in a concentrated form.
Researchers determined the structure of these crystals at a resolution of 1.2 ångströms. They estimated that a single crystal contains more than three times the energy of an equivalent mass of several mammalian milks.
That does not mean people should start milking cockroaches. The study investigated an unusual biological system for concentrating, storing and gradually releasing nutrients—not a new product for the supermarket dairy aisle.
The science of kissing begins with a definition
The Ig Nobel Biomechanics Prize demonstrated what happens when science attempts to measure one of the most familiar human behaviours.
Before researchers could investigate the evolutionary history of kissing, they needed a definition that could be applied consistently across primate species. They settled on non-aggressive, mouth-to-mouth contact involving movement of the lips or mouthparts and no transfer of food.
Using published observations and the primate family tree, the researchers inferred that kissing probably existed in the common ancestor of large apes between 21.5 million and 16.9 million years ago. Their analysis also suggested that Neanderthals probably kissed, although the researchers acknowledged that observational data—particularly beyond the large apes—remain limited.
Romance may not have survived the definition. But the study illustrates a fundamental part of science: before you can compare a behaviour, you must establish exactly what counts as that behaviour.
Unusual science still requires rigorous evidence
There is a danger in romanticising eccentricity. A strange question is not inherently a good one, and an entertaining experiment can still be methodologically weak, ethically questionable or overinterpreted.
The Ig Nobel Prizes work best when the joke opens a door to rigorous science rather than distracting from its absence.
They do not prove that every eccentric experiment deserves funding. A funny premise still requires a sound method, transparent evidence and conclusions that do not outrun the results.
But science also loses something when it rewards only projects accompanied by grand promises and an obvious commercial market. Researchers cannot always know in advance which questions will lead somewhere.
A mosquito’s mouthpart became a manufacturing tool. A badly designed urinal became a problem in applied mathematics. A pair of underpants made an underground ecosystem visible.
Sometimes discovery begins with the question everyone else was too serious, or too embarrassed, to ask.
Further reading:
This is Improbable Too, also by Marc Abrahams