Cows painted like zebras and pizza-eating lizards: The Ig Nobel Prizes are back

By Jack Guy, CNN

(CNN) — Ever wondered whether painting a cow with zebra stripes might reduce the number of fly bites it gets, or which pizza toppings different kinds of lizards prefer? If so, you’re not alone: There are scientists who have studied these and other unusual topics in great detail.

Some of them were honored at the Ig Nobel Prize awards ceremony in Boston on Thursday, organizers from the magazine Annals of Improbable Research said in a statement.

The ceremony — the 35th annual Ig Nobel Prize awards — which took place at Boston University and was also webcast, celebrates “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

As has become tradition at the irreverent event, the in-person audience honors the winners by making and throwing paper airplanes. This year’s ceremony had the theme “digestion,” with guest speakers including Dr. Trisha Pasricha, who has studied the link between using your smartphone on the toilet and developing hemorrhoids, as well as a performance of a mini-opera named “The Plight of the Gastroenterologist.”

The prizes were presented by genuine Nobel laureates.

As well as the aforementioned cow painters and lizard feeders, other winners included William B. Bean, who was posthumously awarded the literature prize for recording and analyzing the growth of one of his fingernails for 35 years, and Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp, who won the pediatrics prize for their work looking into the experience of a nursing baby whose mother eats garlic.

Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles Gignac took the psychology prize for their research into what happens when you tell a narcissist, or anyone else, that they are intelligent, while the chemistry prize was awarded to Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich and Frank Greenway, who experimented with eating Teflon to find out whether it could be used to boost food volume and satiety without adding extra calories.

Other prize winners included Fritz Renner, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field and Jessica Werthmann, who tested the popular theory that drinking alcohol can improve people’s ability to communicate in a foreign language, while Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal analyzed the less-explored avenue of “how foul-smelling shoes affects the good experience of using a shoe-rack” from an engineering design perspective.

A team made up of Francisco Sánchez, Mariana Melcón, Carmi Korine and Berry Pinshow won the aviation prize for their work looking into the effects of alcohol consumption on bats’ ability to fly and echolocate, and the gastronomic theme continued with the physics prize going to a team that studied the physics of pasta sauce, particularly how to avoid an unpleasant clumping effect.

For Carly York, associate professor of biology at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina, who was not involved in the awards, this year’s winners deliver on their aim of making people laugh and then think.

“Beneath every experiment that sounds absurd on the surface lies real insight waiting to be uncovered,” said York, whose book “The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog: And Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science” explains the importance of curiosity as a driver of scientific progress.

“But if the value of this research isn’t immediately obvious to you, consider this: Roughly half of all economic growth in the US can be traced back to scientists driven purely by curiosity,” she added.

“Basic, curiosity-led research has paved the way for some of the most transformative medical and technological breakthroughs of the past century,” said York, who cited the example of how the technology used to sequence DNA grew out of research on how bacteria survive extreme heat.

“And yet, this kind of research often gets sidelined in favor of projects with more immediate payoffs. We’re seeing that now, as federal cuts hit the National Science Foundation, the largest supporter of basic science,” she said.

“But this work is vital. Basic research builds the foundation of knowledge that makes future breakthroughs possible.”

And just in case you’re wondering, cows that were painted with zebra-like stripes were nearly 50% less likely to endure horsefly bites, and rainbow lizards at a holiday resort in Togo were found to prefer four-cheese pizza.

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