The Ig Nobels are an annual science award given to research teams around the world whose contributions to the vast world of research tend to be a wee bit sillier than the rest, though no less valid and worthy of investigation than anyone else’s. Everything on Earth deserves to be examined with the keen eye of an experienced scientist, and every year the Ig Nobels honor the work that is inherently funnier than any other.For the first time in their 35-year history, the ceremony was held outside the U.S., in Zurich, with organizers citing concerns about international scientists traveling to America.Among the winners was a team that designed a urinal that could almost eliminate splashback by controlling the angle at which the urine hits the porcelain. You might laugh at this one day, but when you one day find yourself living in a future where you’re no longer dotting your crotch with splashes of pee, you’ll have a team of Ig Nobel-winning scientists to thank.Another team tried to definitively define what a kiss even is, which they did by examining how different animal species do it, all in an effort to create maybe the most aggressively scientific definition of an inherently romantic act ever conceived. Are you ready to have all the romance sucked out of kissing? Here it is: “non-agonistic interactions involving directed, infraspecific oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer.” Mm. I know I’m in the mood for some sweet loving after that.The Ig Nobels Just Rewarded Science’s Weirdest QuestionsAnother team studied why babies smell just so darn good to their parents while teenagers smell like s—t. The researchers found that parental enthusiasm for a kid’s natural smell declines as the kid gets older and becomes more independent. As the parent-child connection naturally severs, the parent falls out of love with all the little details that make up their child, including their kid’s personal odor. Parents still preferred the smell of their own kids over someone else’s, but overall, they were passing their teenagers around, asking their friends to smell their 168-month-old’s head.Another team won for research I wrote about just a couple of weeks ago, in which scientists tasked thousands of volunteers across Switzerland with burying 2,000 pairs of cotton underwear to test soil health.Other winners include a team that found a way to turn a mosquito proboscis into a nozzle for 3D printing, a team that studied the aerodynamics of blowing your nose, and a team that put in the car, no doubt disgusting work required to find out that milk proteins produced by a specific kind of cockroach produced three times as much energy from milk proteins as cow milk.I salute the researchers of that last one for their admirable work, but the dairy industry better not get any ideas from thisThe post 2026’s Ig Nobel Winners Include Research on Buried Underwear, Cockroach Milk, and Urinal Splashback appeared first on VICE.