The 2025 Ig Nobel Prizes, held at Boston University, honored a strange but serious slice of scientific research, i.e., projects designed to amuse and provoke, not trivialize. Ten awards went to studies that mix curiosity, oddity, and genuine insight, reports ARS Technica.
Some of the standout winners include:
- In Chemistry, researchers Rotem and Daniel Naftalovich, with Frank Greenway, tested whether eating PTFE (Teflon) could make food more filling without adding calories. Rats fed a 25%-Teflon diet over 90 days lost weight and showed no signs of toxicity.
- The Biology Prize went to a team led by Tomoki Kojima, who painted cows with zebra-like stripes. The result: fewer fly bites. The idea links back to zebra camouflage and could offer pest control methods without chemicals.
- The Engineering Design Prize went to Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal, for analyzing, from an engineering design perspective, “how foul-smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe-rack.”
- Aviation was awarded to Francisco Sánchez and colleagues for exploring how alcohol affects bats. Their study found that inebriated bats fly more slowly and their echolocation suffers.
- In Peace, Fritz Renner, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field, and Jessica Werthmann showed that moderate alcohol consumption can boost confidence, and perceived fluency, when speaking a foreign language.
Other winners include studies on:
- the physics of sauce clumping (Cacio e Pepe)
- babies preferring garlic-flavored breast milk
- lizards in Togo drawn to four-cheese pizza
- a study on how narcissistic people react if told they are more intelligent than others
- and one scientist who kept detailed recordings of the growth rate of one of his fingernails over 35 years, winning Literature.
These prizes show that scientific curiosity doesn’t always follow a straight path. Some ideas sound absurd, until you realise they touch on real issues: obesity, pest control, and human behaviour. That blur of humorous framing and deeper insight is what makes the Ig Nobel awards special.