Ig Nobel Awards Honor Quirky Science: From Cockroach Milk to Kissing Evolution

In Zurich on Thursday, a ceremony celebrated the kind of science that makes you laugh and then wonder why nobody thought to study it before. The Ig Nobel Awards, now in their thirty-fifth year, honored researchers who had spent real time and real effort on questions that sound absurd until you realize they're not. Cockroach milk. The evolutionary history of kissing. Whether burying underwear in soil could tell you anything useful about the ground beneath your feet.

The Ig Nobel ceremony exists to recognize legitimate scientific work that is also genuinely strange—the kind of research that makes people smile but that also, upon inspection, asks real questions about how the world works. This year's event, held by the Annals of Improbable Research, marked a notable shift: it was the first time the awards had taken place outside the United States. The organizers had moved the ceremony abroad because they worried that some of the international honorees would face visa difficulties if the event remained in America.

Among the winners was Dr. Paul Piff from the University of California, Irvine, whose research examined whether wealth and social status correlated with unethical behavior. His team found that upper-class individuals were more likely to engage in dishonest acts—the study used the memorable example of taking candy from a child. Piff explained the pattern plainly: as people accumulate wealth and power, they tend to become less attuned to the needs of others and less constrained by social obligation. He framed it without drama. "Taking candy from children might be the least of our worries," he said, "but it's emblematic of the tendency to prioritize one's own needs over those of others."

Other researchers received recognition for work on how to blow your nose properly, what provokes a snake to bite when you gently step on it, and the curious fact that parents find the smell of newborn babies pleasant but recoil from the scent of their teenage children. One team studied whether having a mutual enemy could strengthen a relationship. Another explored whether dead mosquitoes could be used as material for three-dimensional printing. A third investigated the design of urinals that could reduce splashing.

The kissing research came from Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, whose team traced the behavior back 21.5 million years. They had defined kissing with scientific precision: "a non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer." Brindle suggested that the behavior likely served an important evolutionary function and that Neanderthals probably kissed not only each other but also early humans. She offered a thought for the next time someone kissed: you would be participating in a tradition stretching back more than twenty million years, one that was far older than modern human culture and far more ancestral than most people realized.

The ceremony itself followed its own peculiar traditions. Each honoree received a trophy that resembled something between a mushroom and a human foot. As they stood to accept their awards, the audience threw paper airplanes at them. The Ig Nobel has no connection to the actual Nobel Prize, which will announce its winners in October. But for one evening in Zurich, the scientists who had asked the questions nobody else thought to ask were recognized for their work—not despite its strangeness, but because of it.