Cows painted like zebras and pizza-eating lizards – Ig Nobel Prizes honour oddball science
They aren’t the kind of studies that will find a cure for diseases or change lives, instead they’re scientific research that answers the questions nobody asked.
A team of researchers from Japan wondered if painting cows with zebra-like stripes would prevent flies biting them.
A group from Africa and Europe together pondered the types of pizza lizards preferred to eat.
It was those researchers and other slightly odd inquiring minds who were honoured at the recent Ig Nobel awards for comical scientific achievement.
“When I did this experiment I hoped that I would win the Ig Nobel. It’s my dream. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable,” said Tomoki Kojima, whose team put tape on Japanese beef cattle and then spray-painted them with white stripes.
Painting stripes on cows might actually work. Photo: Tomoki Kojima et al
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The odd experiment actually found that fewer flies were attracted to the painted cows and they seemed less bothered by the flies.
Despite the findings, Kojima admitted it might be a challenge to apply this approach on a large scale.
Oh, and rainbow lizards at a holiday resort in Togo were found to prefer four-cheese pizza.
The IG Awards are organised by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights scientific study that makes people laugh and then think.
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Also among the winners was William B Bean, who was posthumously awarded the literature prize for recording and analysing the growth of one of his fingernails for 35 years.
Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp shared won the paediatrics prize for their work looking into the experience of a nursing baby whose mother eats garlic.
Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles Gignac claimed the psychology prize for their research into what happens when you tell a narcissist, or anyone else, that they are intelligent.
Rainbow lizards prefer four-cheese pizza. Photo: Lennart Hudel
The chemistry prize, meanwhile, was awarded to Rotem and 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.
A group from Europe that found drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak a foreign language, while a group from India studied whether foul-smelling shoes influenced someone’s experience using a shoe rack, from an engineering design perspective.
A team of international scientists won the aviation prize for their work looking into the effects of alcohol consumption on bats’ ability to fly and echolocate, while the physics prize went to a team that studied the physics of pasta sauce, particularly how to avoid an unpleasant clumping effect.
“Every great discovery ever, at first glance seemed screwy and laughable,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, said in an email interview.
“The same is true of every worthless discovery. The Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate all these discoveries, because at the very first glance, who really knows?”
During the awards ceremony at Boston University, winners were pelted with paper planes and feted by actual Nobel laureates including Esther Duflo and Eric Maskin.
Duflo won the Nobel prize for her experimental approach to alleviating global poverty and Maskin for laying the foundations of mechanism design theory.
