Once a year, a group of real Nobel Prize winners gathers in Boston to hand out fake Nobel Prizes to honor very real but ridiculous achievements in scientific research. You’ve no doubt heard about it at some point in your life. It’s the Ig Nobel Prize, a celebration of the weirdest, funniest scientific research of the past year.
At the 35th First Annual Ig Nobel Awards, digestion was a recurring theme, as the Chemistry Prize was awarded to researchers who investigated whether Teflon could be added to food to bulk it up without adding calories. As the theory goes, if Teflon is so good at making food slide around a Teflon-coated pan, maybe sliding it into the food itself would ensure that it would effortlessly slide out of you while adding no fat.
Japanese researchers earned the Biology Prize for painting cows like zebras, discovering that doing so cut fly bites in half. Apparently, flies are freaked out by the way the stripes polarize light, which means less pesticide, happier cows, and more confused insects.
2025 Ig Nobel Prizes Go to Teflon-Eating and Garlic-Flavored Breastmilk Studies
On the culinary front, Italian scientists took the Physics Prize for finally answering the age-old question: why is delicious cacio e pepe pasta sauce prone to turning into rock-hard cement? It turns out to be a delicate balance of cheese and starch. Get the ratio wrong, and you’re eating a solid block.
Elsewhere in pizza science, a team studied rainbow lizards at a resort in Togo and found they vastly preferred four-cheese pizza over other options. They took home the Nutrition Prize.
There were others:
- A breastfeeding mother ate a bunch of garlic, thus making her breast milk smell like garlic —which her baby actually preferred to regular breastmilk. Those researchers won the Pediatrics Prize.
- The Peace Prize was awarded to a team of researchers who discovered that alcohol enhances one’s ability to speak Dutch.
- The aviation prize went to a team that found that drunk fruit bats are bad flyers and they have piss-poor echolocation skills.
- Medical historian William Bean was posthumously awarded the Literature Prize for tracking the growth of his thumbnail over 35 years, publishing several papers on the subject.
Congratulations to all the winners. Keep up whatever stupid nonsense got you to this point in your life. Truly.
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