BOSTON (AP) — A team of Japanese researchers considered whether painting cows with zebra-like stripes could deter flies from biting them. Meanwhile, another team from Africa and Europe explored the pizza preferences of lizards.
Those researchers were honored Thursday in Boston with an Ig Nobel, the prize for comical scientific achievement.
“When conducting this experiment, I hoped to win the Ig Nobel. It’s a dream come true. Unbelievable, just unbelievable,” remarked Tomoki Kojima. His team applied tape to Japanese beef cows and then painted white stripes on them. Consequently, fewer flies were drawn to these cows, and the animals appeared less disturbed by the insects.
Despite the findings, Kojima admitted it might be a challenge to apply this approach on a large-scale.
This year’s laureates, celebrated across 10 categories, included a European team that discovered consuming alcohol might enhance one’s ability to speak a foreign language, as well as a researcher who spent decades studying fingernail growth.
“Every monumental discovery seemed odd and laughable initially,” said Marc Abrahams, the master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, in an e-mail interview before the awards event. “The same holds for every trivial discovery. The Ig Nobel Prizes honor all these findings because, at first glance, who can truly tell?”
The 35th annual Ig Nobel prize event is organized by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital publication highlighting research that provokes laughter and thought. It typically takes place weeks before the actual Nobel Prizes are revealed.
The winner’s celebration was set for Thursday night at Boston University, where they were expected to be showered with paper airplanes and celebrated by actual Nobel laureates such as Esther Duflo and Eric Maskin. Duflo was honored for her experimental approach to mitigating global poverty, while Maskin was recognized for his work on mechanism design theory.
A mini-opera about gastroenterologists and their patients, inspired by this year’s theme which is digestion, was also planned.
Other winners this year included a group from India which studied whether foul-smelling shoes influenced someone’s experience using a shoe rack and researchers from the United States and Israel who explored whether eating Teflon is a good way to increase food volume. There was an award for a dead researcher who spent 35 years studying fingernail growth and a winning study from a team of international scientists that looked at whether giving alcohol to bats impaired their ability to fly.
“It’s a great honor for us,” said Francisco Sanchez, one of the researchers from Colombia who studied the drunken bats. “It’s really good. You can see that scientists are not really square and super serious and can have some fun while showing interesting science.”
Sanchez said their research found that the bats weren’t fans of rotten fruit, which often has higher concentrations of alcohol. Maybe for good reason. When they were forced to eat it, their flying and echolocation suffered, he said.
“They actually got drunk similar to what happens to us,” Sanchez said. “When you take some ethanol, you move slower and your speech is impaired.”
