Some readers may wonder what an Ig Nobel Prize is. The Ig Nobel Prizes are a light-hearted parody of the actual Nobel Prizes. On September 3, a dozen people from various countries were declared to be the recipients of the Ig Nobel Prizes for 2026. They were instituted in 1991 by Marc Abraham, editor of The Journal of Irreproducible Research .
The Wan Der Heiden laboratory at the University of Zurich won the soil science prize for asking hundreds of volunteers to bury their used underpants to study soil health. When the prize was announced, the three from the U.S. received their prize wearing cockroach hats! The prize for economics went to psychologist Paul Piff and his colleagues from the University of California Irvine for their study of how upper-class people are likely to be arrogant, cutting off other vehicles and pedestrians in traffic jams. We see examples of such arrogant behaviour in upper class people in India as well. Finally, the chemistry prize went to Sanchari Banerjee, Nitish Satyanarayanan, and Jandhyam Srikanth from InStem Bengaluru, S. Ramaswamy of Purdue University, Leo Chavas of DECTRIS Japan, and Nathan Coussens of the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research in the U.S. for finding that milk proteins from the Diploptera punctata cockroach have more energy content than cow milk.
