The Ig Nobels Left America for the First Time in 35 Years. Cockroach Milk Took a Prize.

The Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded every year since 1991 for research that makes people laugh and then think, were handed out Wednesday in a Zurich convention center — the first time in 35 years the ceremony has been held outside the United States.

Marc Abrahams, who runs the prizes through the digital magazine Annals of Improbable Research, gave a direct reason for the move. "During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country," he said. The ceremony has historically been held at Harvard, with real Nobel laureates handing out the trophies to winners who get a strictly enforced 60 seconds to speak. Organizers plan to alternate between Zurich and other European cities going forward, with the 2027 ceremony set for Antwerp, Belgium.

The winning work was, as usual, real research published in real journals and chosen for being funnier than its authors intended. Matilda Brindle and Stuart West of the University of Oxford, with Catherine F. Talbot of the Florida Institute of Technology, were honored for reconstructing the evolutionary history of kissing — tracing where in the primate lineage the behavior first shows up and what it was for before it meant what it means now.

A prize went to the late Dr. Tokuji Unno for investigating the science of blowing one's nose, a subject that turns out to involve more fluid dynamics and more pressure than the act suggests. Another went to a research team that buried a thousand pairs of underwear across more than 25 countries and dug them back up to measure how fast soil organisms consumed the cotton, which is a genuinely useful proxy for soil biological activity and also, unavoidably, a thousand pairs of buried underwear.

And a prize went to researchers who examined milk from cockroaches. The Pacific beetle cockroach is viviparous and produces a crystalline protein substance to feed its embryos, and the resulting crystals are among the most calorie-dense biological materials known — the reason the subject keeps drawing serious attention from food scientists despite being, at first hearing, a punchline.

Winners receive a custom trophy that Abrahams has described as resembling a cross between a mushroom and a human foot, and are expected to assemble it themselves.

The joke of the Ig Nobels has always had a second half. The prizes reward work that sounds absurd in a headline and holds up as science underneath, and the organizers are careful about the difference. The 2026 move out of the United States is the only part of this year's ceremony that nobody laughed at.