Scientists who studied cockroach milk proteins, splash-free urinals, and buried underpants garnered top honors at the 36th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony on Thursday, Sept. 3. The humorous honors, which are given “for achievements that first make people LAUGH, and then make them THINK,” were awarded in Zurich for the first time, after 35 years of ceremonies in the US. The Ig Nobel’s organizers at the magazine Annals of Improbable Research moved the ceremony because of safety concerns for international winners and journalists traveling to the US, according to Marc Abrahams, Ig Nobel founder and the master of ceremonies.
A team led by João Miguel Alves-Nunes of the University of São Paulo won this year’s Biology Ig Nobel “for gently stepping on various parts of various venomous snakes—repeatedly, at various temperatures at various times of day—to try to learn what does and what does not induce a venomous snake to bite a human,” according to the award citation. While wearing safety boots, the researchers lightly laid a foot down on or near 116 Bothrops jararaca venomous pit vipers. They found that younger and smaller snakes tend to bite more often and that the snakes tend to bite during the daytime, in warm weather, and when stepped on. The controversial study was retracted following concerns about the paper’s animal work (Sci. Rep. 2024, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-88686-x).
The Ig Nobel in Biomechanics went to the University of Oxford’s Matilda Brindle and coworkers, who have redefined kissing as “non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer” after observing the behavior in ants, birds, polar bears, and primates (Evol. Hum. Behav. 2025, DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2025.106788).
The discovery that milk proteins from viviparous cockroaches—insects that nourish their developing offspring within their bodies instead of in an external egg case—possess three times as much energy as cow milk proteins garnered the coveted Chemistry Prize. A team led by Leonard M. G. Chavas at Dectris Japan and Subramanian Ramaswamy at Purdue University studied the proteins from living Diploptera punctata cockroaches (IUCrJ 2016, DOI: 10.1107/S2052252516008903).
For their study “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” Paul K. Piff at the University of California, Irvine, and coworkers took home the Economics Ig Nobel. Among other things, they learned that drivers of expensive, late-model cars were more likely to cut off other vehicles at a busy four-way intersection (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2012, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1118373109).
The late Tokuji Unno, who was an otorhinolaryngologist, posthumously won the Medicine Prize for the 1977 study “How to Blow the Nose—An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing.” The original report is in Japanese, but an English-language summary concludes that a “big and long nose blow” is recommended (Nippon Jibiinkoka Gakkai Kaiho, 80, pp. 11–17).
A good nose blow is in order for the winners of the Olfaction Ig Nobel, which went to researchers led by the University of Wrocław’s Agnieszka Sorokowska “for collecting evidence that babies smell wonderful to their parents, but teenagers do not” (Chem. Percept. 2017, DOI: 10.1007/s12078-017-9230-x).
Jaimie Arona Krems at the University of California, Los Angeles, led the winners of the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for their study, “Sometimes we want vicious friends: People have nuanced preferences for how they want their friends to behave toward them versus others” (Evol. Hum. Behav. 2023, DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2023.02.008).
The Physics Ig Nobel went to a team led by Zhao Pan at the University of Waterloo “for theoretical and experimental attempts to design a splash-free urinal.” The researchers designed a new urinal dubbed the Nautilus. They estimate that if the Nautilus were used to replace the 56 million urinals used in nonresidential settings in the US alone, they would prevent 1 million L of urine from splashing onto public bathroom floors daily (PNAS Nexus 2025, DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf087).
S. Franz Bender at Agroscope and Marcel G. A. van der Heijden at the University of Zurich garnered the Soil Science Prize for organizing a citizen science project that involved burying “1000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries,” and then digging them up after 2 months. Successful breakdown of cotton underpants is apparently an indicator of healthy soil (Science 2025, DOI: 10.1126/science.adw0030).
And finally, the Technology Ig Nobel was awarded to a team, led by Jianyu Li and Changhong Cao at McGill University, that repurposed female mosquitoes’ proboscides into high-resolution 3D-printing nozzles (Sci. Adv. 2025, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adw9953).
A recording of the Ig Nobel ceremony will be available at youtube.com/improbableresearch.
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