Ig Nobel Prizes 2026 awarded to serious work in amusing areas

On September 3, a dozen people from various countries were declared to be the recipients of the Ig Nobel Prizes for 2026. Some readers may wonder what an Ig Nobel Prize is. The Ig Nobel Prizes are a light-hearted parody of the actual Nobel Prizes. They were instituted in 1991 by Marc Abraham, editor of The Journal of Irreproducible Research.

For example, last year, a group from Nigeria worked on how lizards like to eat pizza, and another group was feted for showing that when a lactating mother eats garlic, the baby drinks more milk.

Just as the Nobel Prizes are awarded in various fields of science and the arts, so are the Ig Nobel Prizes. (This column also wrote about the 2025 Ig Nobel Prizes on October 4, 2025.) But while the Nobel Prizes' categories are fixed, those of the Ig Nobel Prizes change year after year.

The Hindu Science Quiz: How much do you know about the Ig Nobels?

For example, this year, the Ig Nobel Prize in biomechanics was awarded to Matilda Brindle and colleagues of Florida State University, who showed how the practice of mouth-to-mouth transfer of food in birds, gorillas, and large apes evolved into lip-to-lip kissing in modern day humans.

The prize for economics went to psychologist Paul Piff and his colleagues from the University of California Irvine for their study of how upper-class people are likely to be arrogant, cutting off other vehicles and pedestrians in traffic jams. We see examples of such arrogant behaviour in upper class people in India as well.

The prize for medicine was awarded posthumously to Tokuji Unno, a physiologist from Japan who studied the aerodynamics of blowing the nose: he showed that doing so inappropriately could lead to a sinus infection as well as that a big and long nose blow prevents upper and lower respiratory tract diseases. The prize was accepted on his behalf by his colleague Miki Takahara.

The prize in biology went to João Miguel Alves-Nunes and colleagues in Sao Pãulo, Brazil, who studied the factors such as body temperature, the ambient temperature, time of day, and interaction with humans that cause snakes to bite people. They learnt that upon physical contact, smaller snakes bite humans more often and that newborn female snakes are particularly prone to biting when provoked.

How magnetic levitation lifts and propels high-speed maglev trains

The olfaction prize went to Ilona Croy and colleagues from the University of Jena in Germany. They studied 235 nursing mothers and found that babies smell wonderful for their parents but less so as they grow up.

The peace prize has been awarded to social psychologists from several universities in the U.S. who studied why people become friends. After studying over a thousand people from the U.S. and India, they came to particular conclusions about how people prefer their friends and their attitudes towards their 'enemies'.

The Wan Der Heiden laboratory at the University of Zurich won the soil science prize for asking hundreds of volunteers to bury their used underpants to study soil health.

Finally, the chemistry prize went to Sanchari Banerjee, Nitish Satyanarayanan, and Jandhyam Srikanth from InStem Bengaluru, S. Ramaswamy of Purdue University, Leo Chavas of DECTRIS Japan, and Nathan Coussens of the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research in the U.S. for finding that milk proteins from the Diploptera punctata cockroach have more energy content than cow milk. When the prize was announced, the three from the U.S. received their prize wearing cockroach hats!