In the weeks before the actual Nobel Prizes are announced, the scientific community gathers every year for something a little more lighthearted: The Ig Nobel Prizes.
Awarded to “honor achievements so surprising that they make people LAUGH, then THINK,” this year marks the 35th anniversary of the awards. These prestigious awards celebrate science’s more unusual contributions, honor the imaginative, and perhaps most importantly, spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.
This year’s honorees brought us pizza-eating lizards, tipsy bats, nail growth, and more that all celebrate the joy and fun in asking any and all questions. You’ll find a complete list of the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize winners (and a recipe from one team) below.
Do lizards like pizza?
It turns out, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are not the only reptiles that have a taste for pizza. Daniele Dendi, Gabriel H. Segniagbeto, Roger Meek, and Luca Luiselli were awarded the nutrition prize, “for studying the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza.”
This team spotted a rainbow lizard stealing a slice of pizza at a resort. As curious scientists, they wanted to know if the rainbow lizards (who primarily eat insects) here had a taste for the Italian dish and if they had a preferred topping, as so many of us do. They followed nine lizards, who had a choice between four-cheese pizza and a plate of “four seasons” pizza.
The lizards quickly found the pizza and ate it, but they only ate the four-cheese pizza. The team believes that it might be easier for them to digest that type of pizza, or there could be some cues that attract them to the cheesier options.
For a scientifically proven best way to reheat pizza, we’ve got you covered.
The perfect cacio e pepe
Pizza was not the only delicious bit of Italian cuisine honored this year. The physics prize went to Giacomo Bartolucci, Daniel Maria Busiello, Matteo Ciarchi, Alberto Corticelli, Ivan Di Terlizzi, Fabrizio Olmeda, Davide Revignas, and Vincenzo Maria Schimmenti, “for discoveries about the physics of pasta sauce, especially the phase transition that can lead to clumping, which can be a cause of unpleasantness.”
When making cacio e pepe, if the water is too hot, or you don’t have the right ratio of cheese-to-starch, the sauce turns into a thin liquid filled with congealed globs of curds. Earlier this year, these physicists developed a way to prevent clumping. Use corn starch in the cheese and pepper sauce instead of solely relying on how much starch gets into the boiling water while the pasta cooks.
If you want to try this at home, here is the recipe:
For two servings:
- Pasta (240 g)
- Pecorino cheese (160 g)
- Cornstarch (4 g)
- Water (40 mL)
- Whole black peppercorns, to taste
Toast peppercorns in a pan until fragrant, then grind them. Mix cornstarch into water while heating until it forms a gel. After the gel cools, combine with pecorino and desired amount of ground black pepper in a blender. Boil pasta, then reserve some of the starchy water before draining it. Mix pasta into the source, adding the pasta water as needed until desired consistency is reached.
How to tell if your baby is a vampire
The food theme continues! Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp were awarded the pediatrics prize, “for studying what a nursing baby experiences when the baby’s mother eats garlic.”
Why garlic? The vegetable with a mythic history of warding off the undead is known to produce flavors in cow milk and can affect body odors in humans. In this team’s study, the mothers who ingested garlic capsules produced milk that had a more intense odor, which peaked at two hours. The infants whose mother ingested the garlic remained attached to the breast for longer periods of time.
One important application is a better understanding of how sensory experiences during breastfeeding influences how infants accept new foods once they are weaned and beyond.
Like watching paint dry–or nails grow
The literature prize was awarded 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.” These detailed records of how his nails grew were written in flowery prose, referencing everything from Moby Dick to medieval astrology.
His final report said, “the nail provides a slowly moving keratin kymograph that measures age on the inexorable abscissa of time.”
Dangerous intelligence
The psychology prize went to Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles Gignac for their work “investigating what happens when you tell narcissists–or anyone else–that they are intelligent.” The pair explored whether believing that one has superior intelligence with positive external feedback can create a temporary state of narcissism.
Unsurprisingly, they found that the external feedback really does help shape a test subject’s perception of their own intelligence, regardless of the accuracy of the feedback.
Cows get their stripes
The biology prize went to Tomoki Kojima, Kazato Oishi, Yasushi Matsubara, Yuki Uchiyama, Yoshihiko Fukushima, Naoto Aoki, Say Sato, Tatsuaki Masuda, Junichi Ueda, Hiroyuki Hirooka, and Katsutoshi Kino, “for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid being bitten by flies.”
In the wild, zebras are surprisingly unfazed and unbothered by flies. Unlike cows, who constantly have to swat the buzzing insects away with their tails or shake around their ears. So do zebra stripes have some power over flies? To find out, the team painted cows with black and white stripes. Their fake zebra stripes decreased the number of biting flies on the cattle and the cows also didn’t have to twitch as much. The team believes that something in the stripes confuses the flies’ motion detection system.
Adding Teflon to food?
Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich, and Frank Greenway were awarded the chemistry prize, “for experiments to test whether eating Teflon [a form of plastic more formally called polytetrafluoroethylene] is a good way to increase food volume and hence satiety without increasing calorie content.”
Diet soda, flavored seltzers, and other drinks without any calories are popular and everywhere. But can a true “zero-calorie food” be developed, the way that artificial sweeteners were? The team on this study believe that this scientific wonder food could be achieved by increasing the satisfying volume and mass of a food–just without increasing the calories. And Teflon might do that, despite its risks. The team says its inert, heat-resistant, impervious to the acids churning in our stomachs, tasteless, cost-effective, and can come in a powder. Their study found that a ratio of three parts of food to one part of Teflon powder could work to get to a true zero-calorie food. A reminder that this is experimental, and should not be tried at home.
Liquid language courage
Bottoms up for this one. The peace prize was awarded to Fritz Renner, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field, and Jessica Werthmann, “for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language.”
To test the idea that alcohol improves language fluency, the team recruited 50 native German-speaking undergraduates in the Netherlands who were also fluent in Dutch. Once divided into two groups, one group had vodka with lemon and the other received plain water. The students in the vodka group drank enough to become slightly intoxicated and then engaged in a conversation in Dutch. They were then asked to rate how well they thought they were speaking their non-native language, with Dutch speakers weighing in.
It turns out, intoxication did improve their fluency, based on the independent observers’ reports. The authors believe that intoxication helps lower language anxiety, allowing for an easier speech.
Don’t drink and fly, even if you’re a bat
Along the same lines as the peace prize, the aviation award also calls for a round–for bats. It was awarded to Francisco Sánchez, Mariana Melcón, Carmi Korine, and Berry Pinshow, “for studying whether ingesting alcohol can impair bats’ ability to fly and also their ability to echolocate.”
Alcohol in the animal kingdom is not completely unheard of. Some mammals, birds, and insects eat fruit full of ethanol and get intoxicated. In this study, the team looked at Egyptian fruit bats, which are known to avoid fruits with ethanol. After eating the alcohol-laden fruit, the bats’ were slow and their echolocation faltered, similar to how human speech becomes slurred. With this impaired echolocation, the bats that binged on the fermented fruit could be at a higher risk of dangerous and deadly collisions.
Pee-yew! Those shoes smell unless treated with UV light
Hold your nose for this one. Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal were awarded the engineering prize, “for analyzing, from an engineering design perspective, how foul-smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe-rack.”
This pilot study of 149 first-year students at Shiv Nadar University (SNU) in Uttar Pradesh, India to develop a shoe rack to air out those smelly shoes and uses a UVC tube light to deliver bacteria-killing UV rays as a way to reduce the odor. They tested this shoe rack with the shoes from several athletes from the university and found that exposing the smelly sneakers to the light for two to three minutes kills the odor-causing bacteria.
We here at Popular Science offer a hearty congratulations to all of this years’ winners!
The post The 2025 Ig Nobel Prizes honor garlicky babies, drunk bats, and more appeared first on Popular Science.
