World of the Bizarre

By T.K. Randall
October 4, 2026

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney)

Once again, some of the strangest research projects have been recognized for their bizarrity and originality.

A parody of the better-known and more prestigious Nobel Prize, the Ig Nobel Prize seeks to offer recognition to those who have contributed to the world of science in more unusual ways.

The winners are typically those who have engaged in research into strange, bizarre and often ludicrous ideas and concepts and this year's recipients are no exception.

2026's prize recipients, who were revealed in Zurich, Switzerland back in September, included a team who studied cockroach milk and another who sent 1,000 pairs of underpants to 25 countries to see how the soil in each location helped them to decompose.

Elsewhere, the biomechanics prize went to a researcher who devised a more concise definition of kissing in humans, ants and polar bears.

The act was described as "non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer."

Another team won the prize for economics by analyzing whether upper-class people were more likely to steal candy from a baby, while the biology prize went to researchers who repeatedly stepped on snakes in order to find out what induced the animals to bite.

The physics prize went to a team that researched ways to build a splsh-free urinal, while the prize for medicine went to the people behind an "aerodynamic study of nose-blowing."

You can check out a video of the event below.

Source: Huffington Post

Tags: Ig Nobel Prize