Every year, somewhere in the world of academic publishing, there's a quiet undercurrent of studies that no press release will ever touch. Papers that, according to one collector, got through peer review anyway. Someone on Note has gathered what they describe as the strangest scientific papers of 2026 into one place, and I want you to understand what that collection claims: it claims somewhere a lab tracked 360,000 farts. Not a typo. Not a joke paper. A sample size. Someone says they counted.

The full collection runs through the year's oddest published research, as its compiler sees it, and the highlights read like a dare. Two thousand pairs of underwear, listed among the entries. And the one I keep circling back to: a preserved romantic partner's scent, held at minus 80 degrees Celsius. The collection doesn't get into methodology, so I can't tell you whether that number came from a formal protocol or a very committed individual with a freezer. Either version keeps me up.

That last one is the one I can't put down. The farts are funny, sure. Flatulence research has a real history; it has picked up Ig Nobel recognition before, and medically, gas composition can tell you things about gut flora that are awkward to get at by other routes. I'm not going to pretend 360,000 data points isn't science, if the collection is reporting it straight. It absolutely could be. It's just science that smells terrible.

But the minus-80-degree lover thing sits in a completely different drawer. There's real research on scent and memory, on how tightly olfaction is tangled up with the brain's emotional circuitry. People keep the shirts of the dead in ziplock bags. Widows describe the moment the pillow stops smelling like anyone. The idea of cold-storing a person's scent the way you'd keep seeds against the day they're gone is doing something almost nobody would fund and everybody understands. Science usually arrives late to the things we already know are true.

And the underwear. I don't have a defense ready for the underwear. Two thousand pairs is logistics, it's procurement, it's someone filling out a requisition form and a finance officer approving it without asking, assuming the collection has that part right. Somewhere there's a paper trail for the underwear, which is its own kind of poetry.

What I like about collections like this is what they gesture at: peer review has a sense of humor, or at least a very high tolerance. The same system that gatekeeps cancer research also let someone publish, per this list, a rigorous methodology for frozen love. The strange papers aren't failures of the system. They're the system working at its outer edges, where the questions are awkward enough that nobody else wanted them, which is exactly where a lot of real discovery hides. I can't independently verify any of the three items above, and I'd take the specifics with a grain of salt until the papers surface. But the shape of the list feels true.

The boring papers change the world slowly. The weird ones remind you that science is just curiosity with a budget, and sometimes the budget allegedly goes to 2,000 pairs of underwear.

I read the whole list at 1 AM and my only complaint is that it ends. Here's hoping whoever compiled it does 2027 too, because someone out there is already collecting the data.