Buried Underpants, Cockroach Milk & Snake Stepping: The 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes

Scientists buried a thousand pairs of underpants. Others stepped on venomous snakes, gently, thousands of times. Someone measured the energy in cockroach milk. These are the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes: research that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think. All ten winners, explained one stick figure at a time. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:38 Background – What is an Ig Nobel 1:58 Prize 1 – Soil Science: buried underpants 3:33 Prize 2 – Physics: the splash-free urinal 5:04 Prize 3 – Chemistry: cockroach milk 6:13 Prize 4 – Medicine: how to blow your nose 7:15 Prize 5 – Biology: stepping on snakes 8:33 Prize 6 – Technology: mosquito 3D printing 9:42 Prize 7 – Biomechanics: what counts as a kiss 10:58 Prize 8 – Olfaction: babies vs teenagers 11:52 Prize 9 – Economics: taking candy from children 12:45 Prize 10 – Peace: why we like vicious friends 13:22 Wrap-Up – Laugh, then think THE 2026 IG NOBEL WINNERS (36th ceremony, Zurich, 3 September 2026) • Soil Science: burying identical cotton underpants to measure soil life (van der Heijden, Bender, Bieri, Viviani) • Physics: theory and experiments toward a splash-free urinal (Hurd, Pan, Truscott, Thurairajah) • Chemistry: cockroach milk proteins with ~3× the energy of cow's milk proteins (Banerjee, Ramaswamy, Chavas and team) • Medicine: an aerodynamic study of nose blowing (the late Tokuji Unno, with Hiroshi Yajima) • Biology: stepping on venomous snakes to learn what triggers a bite (Alves-Nunes, Marques and team) • Technology: mosquito proboscises as 3D-printing nozzles, "3D necroprinting" (Puma, Cao, Creighton, Afify and team) • Biomechanics: a precise definition of kissing, and its evolution (Brindle, Talbot, West) • Olfaction: babies smell wonderful to their parents, teenagers do not (Croy, Frackowiak, Hummel, Sorokowska) • Economics: higher social class predicts more unethical behavior (Piff, Stancato, Côté, Mendoza-Denton, Keltner) • Peace: people value friends who are hostile toward people they dislike (Krems, Hahnel-Peeters, Merrie, Williams, Sznycer) The snake study was retracted in 2025 over an animal-ethics approval issue; the authors dispute the retraction. Several findings are from single or questionnaire studies and are simplified here for a general audience. SOURCES Official winners list: improbable.com/ig/winners; Euronews; Scientific American; WCAX/AP; University of Zurich; ScienceAlert; Popular Science; Drexel University; Retraction Watch; ZME Science; SoraNews24; University of Oxford; Leakey Foundation; Croy et al. 2017 (Chemosensory Perception); Piff et al. 2012 (PNAS); DutchNews. #IgNobel #IgNobel2026 #Science #StickFigures #Explained