"The 2026 Ig Nobel Prize winners are announced"

Housekeeping first, then the awards overview.

From Improbable Research, September 3:

The 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded at the 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, on Thursday evening, September 3, 2026. The ceremony itself begina at 7:00 pm (Central European time). The pre-show dance performance began at 6:45 pm. The webcast began a few minutes earlier than that. The previous 35 ceremonies all took place in the USA, in Cambridge/Boston. In a break from tradition, this year’s ceremony took place in Zürich, Switzerland.

The webcast was (and in recorded form, is) available here and on our Youtube channel:....

....WHAT: Ten new Ig Nobel Prize winners were introduced — each has done something that makes people LAUGH, then THINK. Several bemused Nobel laureates, Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, Michel Mayor, and Tim Hunt, physically handed them the prizes. The 1500 people in the audience showered everyone with paper airplanes. Some of the world’s great thinkers, Els Titeca, Tim Hunt, Marcel van der Hiejden, Alessio Figalli, and Tess Heeremans, each gave a 24/7 Lecture, explaining a topic first in 24 seconds, then in seven words. A new opera song, performed by soprano Serafina Giannoni and pianist Edward Rushton, celebrated this year’s ceremony theme: “FUNGI”. As the audience wandered into the theatre, they savored a pre-show dance performance, “The Laboratory of Small Disasters”, by Vanessa Morandell and Company Lava. A four-piece orchestra — accordion, didgeridoo, alphorn, and yodeler — injected fanfares. Somewhere, far away, joyless pedants shook their heads in dismay...

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The 2026 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

The 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded at the 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, on Thursday, September 3, 2026, in Zurich, Switzerland. The ceremony was webcast.

IG NOBEL BIOMECHANICS PRIZE 2026 [UK, USA]
Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot, and Stuart West for devising a more precise definition of kissing — “non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer” — in ants, birds, polar bears, and humans.

REFERENCE: “A Comparative Approach to Kissing,” Matilda Brindle, Catherine F. Talbot, and Stuart West, Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 47, no. 6, 2026, article 106788. <doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2025.106788>
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot, Stuart West

IG NOBEL ECONOMICS PRIZE 2026 [USA, MEXICO, CANADA]
Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, for amassing 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.

REFERENCE: “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 109, no. 11, 2012, pp. 4086-4091. <doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1118373109>
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Paul Piff

IG NOBEL CHEMISTRY PRIZE 2026 [INDIA, FRANCE, JAPAN, USA]
Sanchari Banerjee, Nathan Coussens, François-Xavier Gallat, Nitish Sathyanarayanan, Jandhyam Srikanth, Koichiro Yagi, James Gray, Stephen Tobe, Barbara Stay, Leonard Chavas, and Subramanian Ramaswamy for discovering that milk proteins from vivaparous cockroaches packs three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows.

REFERENCE: “Structure of a Heterogeneous, Glycosylated, Lipid-Bound, in Vivo-Grown Protein Crystal at Atomic Resolution from the Viviparous Cockroach Diploptera punctata,” Sanchari Banerjee, Nathan P. Coussens, François-Xavier Gallat, Nitish Sathyanarayanan, Jandhyam Srikanth, Koichiro J. Yagi, James S.S. Gray, Stephen S. Tobe, Barbara Stay, Leonard M. G. Chavas, and Subramanian Ramaswamy, IUCrJ, vol. 3, no. 4, 2016, pp. 282-293. <doi.org/10.1107/S2052252516008903>
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Leo Chavas, Subramanian Ramaswamy, Nathan P. Coussens....

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As queried when first we heard of cockroach milk (2017):

Scientists Swear Cockroach Milk Is the Next Big Superfood

But how do you milk the wee vermin?