Offbeat scientific studies—including one that involved eating Teflon—were celebrated Thursday at the annual Ig Nobel awards. Many of this year's winners at the Boston University ceremony, organized by the Annals of Improbable Research, focused on digestion. Winners were awarded a hand-made model of a human stomach and the ceremony included a mini-opera about gastroenterologists, the AP reports. The prizes were handed out by real Nobel laureates. Among the winners:
- Nutrition. The prize went to a team that noticed rainbow lizards at a seaside resort in the West African country of Togo stealing a tourist's slice of pizza, Ars Technica reports. Their research determined that the lizards will eagerly devour four-cheese pizza, but they're not interested in "four seasons" pizza with a wider range of toppings.
- Aviation. Does alcohol impair bats' ability to fly and echolocate? The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, was yes, a team of scientists found, which may explain why fruit bats avoid rotten fruit with high concentrations of ethanol.
- Chemistry. The prize went to researchers who found that Teflon, a form of plastic, increased food volume and feelings of satiety without adding calories. They said it was a safe way to fight obesity, but the FDA wasn't interested, the Guardian reports. "I don't think they wanted to review it because it was such a wonky idea," says researcher Rotem Naftalovich at Rutgers University.
- Literature. The prize went to the "late Dr. William B. Bean, for persistently recording and analyzing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years," organizers said. Ars Technica explains that it was in the literature category because of the "flowery prose" of Bean, who "sprinkles his observations with ponderous references to medieval astrology, James Boswell, and Moby Dick."
- Peace. The peace prize went to a team that found drinking alcohol improves a person's ability to speak a foreign language, though the improvement was relatively modest, the Guardian reports. "It's not like people were transformed into perfect Dutch speakers after a single drink," says University of Sheffield psychologist Matt Field.
Other winning studies involved giving garlic to nursing mothers, exploring the physics of pasta sauce, telling narcissists that they are intelligent, and painting cows with stripes to reduce fly bites. Click for a
full list of winners.
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