Ig Nobel prizes move to Zurich and reward buried underwear, kiss definitions and mosquito nozzles

The Ig Nobel prizes left the United States this year. Marc Abrahams and the Annals of Improbable Research staged the 2026 show on 3 September at the University of Zurich, with ETH Domain as co-host, after Abrahams said the country had become “unsafe” for international guests. Real Nobel laureates still walked on stage. Winners still gave the 24/7 lecture: 24 seconds, then seven words. The trophy was still a 10-trillion Zimbabwean dollar note.

The biomechanics prize went to Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot and Stuart West at Oxford for a definition of kissing that works across species and rules out feeding: “non-agonistic interactions involving directed, infraspecific oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer.” Brindle is writing a book on non-reproductive sexual behaviour and has already published on the evolution of masturbation. She said the team was thrilled.

Economics went to Paul Piff of the University of California, Irvine, with Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton and Dacher Keltner, for a stack of experiments that found upper-class people more likely to cut other drivers off, lie at work and take sweets left out for children. Piff said he had followed the prizes since college and had not expected to win one.

Chemistry honoured a group including Sanchari Banerjee and Subramanian Ramaswamy for showing that milk proteins from a live-bearing cockroach carry about three times the energy of cow-milk proteins. Medicine went, posthumously, to Tokuji Unno for a 1977 paper titled “How to Blow the Nose — An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing.” Biology went to a Brazilian team that stepped, carefully, on different parts of snakes to see what makes a venomous animal strike.

Physics went to Randy Hurd, Zhao Pan, Tadd Truscott and Kaveeshan Thurairajah for theory and hardware that cut urinal splash. A stream that hits the porcelain at less than 30 degrees almost stops the bounce. They then shaped a urinal that keeps that angle even when the user does not. Pan, who runs the lab at the University of Waterloo, said he was proud.

Technology went to a McGill and partners team for “necroprinting”: using the mouthparts of dead female mosquitoes as 3D-print nozzles that lay lines about 20 microns wide, finer than common metal needles and cheaper to source. Soil science went to a Dutch-Swiss citizen project that buried 1,000 pairs of organic cotton underwear in more than 25 countries and dug them up two months later. The more life in the soil, the less fabric came back. The elastic waistband survived. The cotton did not.

Abrahams compared the new European base to Eurovision. The joke lands because the content did not change. The prizes still aim to make people laugh, then think. The venue change is the part that will be in the political briefings. A science-humour show that ran for decades at Harvard and MIT now treats US entry rules as a reason to cross the Atlantic. The underwear and the mosquitoes will be remembered longer than the press release about safety. The move itself is the 2026 result that does not need a lab.