The 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes

Gary Arndt (0:00)

Scientific research is usually associated with serious people asking serious questions. However, some of the most fascinating discoveries come from investigating things that seem completely ridiculous. Every year, a special set of awards honors researchers whose work make people laugh and then think. And this year's winners explored subjects ranging from the bizarre to the downright disgusting. Learn more about the strange and surprising research honored by the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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To all the listeners of Everything Everywhere Daily, I owe you an apology. For the entire time this podcast has been published, I have not covered the Ig Nobel Prizes. I could have been covering some of the world's most interesting research for six years, but I haven't. So if the best time to start was six years ago, the second best time has got to be today. As I have never covered the Ig Nobel Prizes before, I should give a bit of background on the awards themselves. The Ig Nobel Prizes are a humorous counterpart to the Nobel Prizes, regarding scientific research and other achievements that first make people laugh and then make people think. Although the subjects can seem absurd, much of the winning research is legitimate scientific work that explores unusual questions or uses unconventional methods.

Mark Abrams, the editor and co-founder of the Annals of Improbable Research, established the awards in 1991 and the organization now administers the prizes. The name plays on the word Ig Nobel, meaning dishonorable or lacking dignity, and the Nobel Prizes. The awards were originally presented at MIT before moving to Harvard for many years. Each year the committee awards ten prizes in categories that include traditional scientific fields as well as special categories chosen to suit the winning research. Candidates may be nominated by anyone, including themselves. A selection committee reviews the nominations, privately contacts winners, and gives them the option to decline. Genuine Nobel laureates traditionally present the prizes at a ceremony featuring short acceptance speeches and intentionally ridiculous entertainment. And I should note that one person has won both an Ig Nobel Prize and a Nobel Prize. Andre Geim won a 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for Levitating a Frog with a Magnet and a 2010 Nobel Prize for Research on the Electromagnetic Properties of Graphene.

So with that, let's move on to the 2026 award winners. The Biomechanics Prize was awarded to Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot and Stuart West for a scientific definition of kissing.

The researchers tackled a deceptively complicated question. What exactly constitutes a kiss? Although kissing seems distinctly human, scientists have observed mouth-to-mouth contact among many other animals. The challenge was creating a definition precise enough to compare behaviors across species without confusing kissing with fighting, feeding or grooming. The researchers propose defining kissing as non-aggressive mouth-to-mouth contact between members of the same species, involving some movement of the lips or mouth parts and without transferring food. Their comparative research considered behaviors in animals ranging from insects to mammals, including birds and polar bears.