The 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes, which celebrate unusual, imaginative, and inspiring advances in science, were announced on September 3, 2026, in Zurich, Switzerland. This year’s prizes honored discoveries from the surprisingly high protein content of cockroach milk to measuring soil health with 1,000 pairs of underwear.1,2
The winners of this year’s Technology Prize developed a new way to 3D print by turning mosquitoes on their heads, literally. The researchers, led by mechanical engineer Changhong Cao and bioengineer Jianyu Li at McGill University, found that they could co-opt the mosquito’s blood-sucking organ, called the proboscis, as an ultra-fine 3D printing nozzle.3 They called the new biohybrid technique 3D “necroprinting.”
“Mosquito proboscides let us print extremely small, precise structures that are difficult or very expensive to produce with conventional tools. Since biological nozzles are biodegradable, we can repurpose materials that would otherwise be discarded,” said Cao in a press release about the study when it was first published.
Before the team settled on the mosquito proboscis as their 3D printing nozzle of choice, they scoured the natural world for biomaterials with the best potential micro-dispensing capabilities. The ideal 3D printing nozzle should have very little curvature and be made of both strong and stiff material. After sifting through fangs, stingers, plant xylem vessels, and probosces from bed bugs, tsetse flies, and more, the team landed on the proboscis from the female mosquito. With its minimal curvature, strong structure, narrow inner diameter, and 2mm length, it was perfect.
To build their bio-hybrid 3D printer, the researchers attached the mosquito proboscis to a standard dispense tip on a 3D printer and characterized the pressures it could withstand and the bioink extrusion speeds it could attain. The proboscis allowed them to print lines as narrow as 20μm, which surpassed the ability of the smallest, commonly used commercially available 3D printing tip by about 250 percent.
They then used their system to print high-resolution structures in the shape of a honeycomb and maple leaf along with tiny bioscaffolds that held individual suspensions of cancer cells and red blood cells. The team also saw that the proboscis 3D printing system could act as a drug delivery set up, injecting a model drug carrier into pig skin at picomolar concentrations.
“By introducing biotic materials as viable substitutes to complex engineered components, this work paves the way for sustainable and innovative solutions in advanced manufacturing and microengineering,” said Li in the statement.
Mosquitoes and their blood-sucking appendages, it turns out, can be so much more than summer pests.
- Banerjee S, et al. Structure of a heterogeneous, glycosylated, lipid-bound, in vivo-grown protein crystal at atomic resolution from the viviparous cockroach Diploptera punctata. IUCrJ. 2016;3(4):282-293.
- Bender SF, van der Heijden MGA. Assessing soil health with underpants. Science. 2025;387(6737):936-936.
- Puma J, et al. 3D necroprinting: Leveraging biotic material as the nozzle for 3D printing. Science Advances. 2025;11(47):eadw9953.
