2026 Ig Nobels leave U.S. for first time, honoring splash-free urinals and kissing research

According to NPR News, Marc Abrahams, who founded the Ig Nobels in 1991, said four of last year's 10 winners stayed away from the ceremony because of concerns about U.S. immigration and visa protocols. “Last year, of the 10 winners, we ended up with only six of them at the ceremony,” he said. Abrahams said the absentees had seen reports of people being sent home on arrival, interrogated in detail about their personal lives, or possibly detained or deported.

Abrahams said moving abroad also offers a fresh start. “When you've been doing something for 35 years, what's the chance you're ever going to get to start it all over again afresh?” he said. Kees Moeliker, retired director of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam and a former Ig Nobel winner, called the move bittersweet: “It's a sad decision to move from where it all started, but it's also opening new horizons for us and new audiences.” Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, said the decision is “quite rational,” and that international scientists have become less enthusiastic about traveling to the U.S. “A principle by which the United States built its scientific excellence, which is that we welcome the best scientific talent from all over the world — that is no longer the case,” Thorp said.

The physics prize went to a team that designed a splash-free urinal. Tadd Truscott, a fluid dynamicist at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and part of the winning group, said he determined the optimal stream angle of less than 30 degrees to prevent splashback. His colleagues then redesigned a urinal so that any stream direction maintains that minimum angle, he said. Truscott said he was overwhelmed when he heard about the award: “I almost passed out, I was so excited.”

NPR News reported that the economics prize honored a group that found people in higher social classes were more likely to take from a children's candy stash. The medicine prize went to a late researcher who studied the aerodynamics of nose blowing. The biomechanics prize went to a team that proposed defining a kiss as “a non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer.” Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford and part of the team, said that definition helps scientists study kissing across species, and that kissing appears in most living large apes and likely in Neanderthals; early humans and Neanderthals may even have kissed one another. “That's really exciting,” Brindle said.

Ars Technica notes that the 2026 roster also featured work on using mosquito proboscises to “necroprint” tiny nozzles and on decomposition rates of buried cotton underwear. The ceremony traditionally includes miniature operas and “24/7 lectures” in which winners must explain their research in 24 seconds and then in seven words. All recipients received a statuette — this year a slab of blue cheese topped by a foot erupting with toadstools — and 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, a currency that collapsed years ago.