Ig Nobel Prize Celebrates Bizarre Research in Boston

Boston, MA — The 35th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony took place at Boston University on September 18, 2025, highlighting quirky research designed to make people laugh and think. This year’s winners included a team of Japanese researchers who painted cows with zebra-like stripes to reduce fly bites.

The ceremony, streamed online, featured Nobel laureates presenting the awards. According to Marc Abrahams, the event’s master of ceremonies, the prizes celebrate unusual achievements that spark curiosity. “Every great discovery ever, at first glance seemed screwy and laughable,” he said.

The Biology Prize was awarded to Tomoki Kojima and his team for their study showing that cows painted with zebra stripes were nearly 50% less likely to suffer from horsefly bites. The researchers believe the stripes may confuse the flies, preventing them from landing easily.

Another award went to researchers Daniele Dendi, Gabriel Segniagbeto, Roger Meek, and Luca Luiselli for exploring the pizza preferences of rainbow lizards at a resort in Togo. The lizards showed a clear preference for four-cheese pizza over four-seasons pizza.

The Nutrition Prize was presented to Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp for their work on how nursing infants react to garlic in their mother’s diet. Meanwhile, the Psychology Prize went to Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles Gignac, who studied how telling someone they are intelligent affects their narcissism levels.

The Chemistry Prize was awarded to Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich, and Frank Greenway for testing the effects of Teflon on food volume and satiety. They proposed in their experiment that incorporating Teflon into food could help in reducing calorie intake without sacrificing volume.

Other notable winners included researchers Fritz Renner, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field, and Jessica Werthmann, who found that a small amount of alcohol could improve language skills among speakers of a foreign language, and a team that analyzed how bad-smelling shoes affected experiences with shoe racks.

As the theme of the ceremony was “digestion,” it featured guest speaker Dr. Trisha Pasricha, who discussed the link between smartphone use in the bathroom and developing hemorrhoids, along with a mini-opera titled “The Plight of the Gastroenterologist.”