Does alcohol enhance one’s foreign language fluency? Do West African lizards have a preferred pizza topping? And can painting cows with zebra stripes help repel biting flies? These and other unusual research questions were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2025 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it’s that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science.
Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words.
Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.
Without further ado, here are the winners of the 2025 Ig Nobel prizes.
Biology
Photograph: Tomoki Kojima et al., 2019
Citation: 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.
Any dairy farmer can tell you that biting flies are a pestilent scourge for cattle herds, which is why one so often sees cows throwing their heads, stamping their feet, flicking their tails, and twitching their skin—desperately trying to shake off the nasty creatures. There’s an economic cost as well since it causes the cattle to graze and feed less, bed down for shorter times, and start bunching together, which increases heat stress and risks injury to the animals. That results in less milk yield for dairy cows and less beef yields from feedlot cattle.
You know who isn’t much bothered by biting flies? The zebra. Scientists have long debated the function of the zebra’s distinctive black-and-white striped pattern. Is it for camouflage? Confusing potential predators? Or is it to repel those pesky flies? Tomoki Kojima et al. decided to put the latter hypothesis to the test, painting zebra stripes on six pregnant Japanese black cows at the Aichi Agricultural Research Center in Japan. They used water-borne lacquers that washed away after a few days, so the cows could take turns being in three different groups: zebra stripes, just black stripes, or no stripes (as a control).
