Zhao Pan and Kaveeshan Thurairajah win an Ig Nobel Physics Prize for a splash-free urinal

Mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor Zhao Pan and PhD student Kaveeshan Thurairajah won the 2026 Ig Nobel Physics Prize for a splash-free urinal design. They toasted the news with blueberry wine from espresso cups in his office, then attended the sold-out ceremony in Zurich in bright yellow raincoats.

The Ig Nobels, organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, honour research that makes people laugh, then think. The winning design, Nautilus (pronounced Nauti-loo), all but eliminates splatter by keeping the angle at which a stream meets the wall under about 30 degrees, a limit found by theoretical modelling and checked in physical experiments. More than a decade of off-and-on research went into it.

Pan says most of the work, which led to a journal paper in 2025, was done by undergraduate students, including Mabel Song and JD Zhu. Thurairajah was still an undergraduate when he led the study and first presented early findings at a conference in the United States in 2022. Professors Randy Hurd of Weber State University and Tadd Truscott of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology are also on the team. Ten prizes were awarded in all.