The 2026 Ig Nobel prizewinners in full

BIOMECHANICS

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

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 incomes.

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 cows.

MEDICINE

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

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 human.

PHYSICS

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

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 necroprinting.

OLFACTION

Ilona Croy, Tomasz Frackowiak, Thomas Hummel and Agnieszka Sorokowska, for collecting evidence that babies smell great to their parents, but teenagers do not.

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 dislike.

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 later.