When people imagine scientific research, they often picture lab coats, microscopes and sophisticated machines. In practice, though, science can take place in far less conventional settings.

Across the globe, researchers are pursuing unusual questions in unexpected ways — including carefully pressing different areas of a venomous snake to determine which actions are most likely to provoke it into biting a person.

That project was among 10 studies recognized Thursday at the Ig Nobel awards, which celebrate scientific work that, in the words of the organizers, “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think.”

The 36th annual ceremony was held Thursday in Zurich, Switzerland, with fungi serving as the theme for this year’s event.

Created as a playful counterpart to the Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobels are organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research.

Along with the familiar tradition of paper airplanes being tossed through the venue, the audience saw a newly written opera piece about fungi, performed by Nobel Prize winners dressed in mushroom costumes.

Other honored studies included economics research finding that wealthier people may be more likely to take candy intended for children and display other unethical behavior. The chemistry award went to work showing that cockroach milk contains roughly three times the energy found in cow’s milk.

The medicine prize, meanwhile, recognized a paper titled “How to Blow the Nose — An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing.”

A study examining the evolutionary origins of kissing received the biomechanics prize. Its co-author, Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in England, said that science — especially work not closely tied to industry or technology — has increasingly faced pressure to justify its value.

Applied science is essential, Brindle said, but science would lose something important if researchers stopped observing the world and asking why things happen. Curiosity-driven inquiry, she added, is central to scientific progress.

The physics prize went to research on creating urinals that reduce splashing, while the technology prize honored scientists who turned mosquito proboscises into nozzles for 3D printing, an approach they called “necroprinting.”

Changhong Cao, a co-author of the necroprinting work and an associate professor of mechanical engineering at McGill University in Canada, said the awards support open-ended and exploratory ways of thinking.

No one begins with a plan to make a 3D-printing nozzle from a mosquito, Cao said. The idea emerged from noticing something that seemed unimportant and remaining willing to follow the question wherever it led.

From zebra-painted cows to pizza-loving lizards, the Ig Nobel Prizes continue to celebrate science’s stranger side.

Carly Anne York, an associate professor of biology at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina, who was not involved with the awards, said the Ig Nobels consistently showcase research that makes audiences laugh before encouraging deeper reflection.

From using dirty underwear in soil experiments to developing mosquito-based 3D models, this year’s winners transformed ideas that might sound absurd into credible scientific investigations, York said. These projects, she emphasized, are real science.

Research that initially appears playful or trivial can still have major value: a significant share of economic growth in the United States has been linked to discoveries that began as basic research, she added.

A three-dimensional model of a mosquito mouth, for example, could one day help inspire a less painful way to deliver medicine, York said.

What is certain, she added, is that expanding human knowledge is never pointless, even when the subject itself seems silly.