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

Zurich’s Fungal Gala: The 36th Ig Nobel Awards Celebrate Science’s Odder Corners

Healfromzero.com – The 36th annual Ig Nobel ceremony unfolded in Zurich, Switzerland, under a theme that might have been lifted straight from a mycology textbook: fungi. Where the Nobel Prizes in Stockholm typically honor breakthroughs in physics, chemistry, or medicine with solemn gravitas, this spoof counterpart — organized by the journal Annals of Improbable Research — chose to spotlight ten studies that, in the words of the event’s organizers, “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” The result was a night of paper airplanes arcing across the auditorium, a newly composed operatic number about mushrooms sung by actual Nobel laureates in full mushroom costumes, and a roster of winners ranging from aerodynamic nose-blowing to the evolutionary origins of kissing.

What the Ig Nobels Actually Are

For readers unfamiliar with the tradition, the Ig Nobel Prizes were conceived as a deliberate parody of the Swedish Nobel ceremonies. Each year, a panel selects research projects that are genuinely peer-reviewed, genuinely published, and genuinely useful — yet so unexpected in their subject matter that they provoke an involuntary grin before the intellectual payoff lands. The awards span categories including physics, chemistry, medicine, economics, technology, and biomechanics, among others. They are not jokes in the sense of being unserious; every winning project passed through standard academic review and contributes real data to its field.

This Year’s Winners: A Tour Through the Absurd

The medicine category went to a study titled “How to Blow the Nose — An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing,” which treated the act of clearing one’s nasal passages as a fluid-dynamics problem worthy of rigorous measurement. The chemistry prize recognized work demonstrating that cockroach milk packs roughly three times the caloric energy of cow’s milk — a finding with potential implications for sustainable protein and lipid sourcing. In economics, researchers presented “evidence that upper class people are more likely to snatch from a children’s supply of candy, and engage in other kinds of unethical behavior,” a result that reframes a playground observation as a question of class-based moral psychology.

The physics award honored engineering work on splash-free urinal design, a problem that has occupied municipal planners and fluid-mechanists alike for decades. The technology prize went to a team that repurposed mosquito proboscises as functional nozzles for 3D printing, a process the authors dubbed “necroprinting.” And the biomechanics category was claimed by a study tracing the evolutionary history of kissing, examining how the behavior emerged and spread across primate lineages.

One of the ten honored projects also examined venomous snake behavior by gently stepping on different body regions of the animals to determine precisely which stimuli trigger a defensive bite aimed at a human. The work, while visually unsettling, addresses a practical question in herpetology and public-safety planning.

Voices from the Podium

Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in England and co-author of the kissing study, used her acceptance moment to speak about the broader climate for basic research. She told CNN:

“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.”

Brindle continued:

“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.”

Changhong Cao, associate professor in the department of mechanical engineering at McGill University in Canada and co-author of the necroprinting study, framed the award as validation for a particular mode of inquiry. Speaking to CNN, he said the Ig Nobels “help legitimize … exploratory thinking,” and elaborated:

“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.”

Why the Silly Stuff Matters

Carly Anne York, an associate professor of biology at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina, was not connected to this year’s awards but weighed in on their cultural significance. York, who authored the book The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog: And Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science, observed that the Ig Nobels “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 said.

She pointed to a broader economic argument: roughly half of all economic growth in the United States can be traced back to discoveries originating in basic, curiosity-driven research rather than targeted applied programs. The mosquito-mouth 3D model, she suggested, might one day inspire a painless new method of drug delivery.

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

The fungi theme of this year’s ceremony — complete with costumed laureates and a bespoke aria — underscored a point the organizers have made since the awards’ inception: the boundary between the ridiculous and the rigorous is thinner than public perception allows. A study of nasal airflow or a cockroach’s lactation chemistry may sound like a bar joke, yet each feeds data into models that inform public health, materials science, or evolutionary biology. The Ig Nobels, for all their paper airplanes and mushroom hats, function as a public reminder that science’s full scope extends well beyond the grant proposal’s tidy abstract.