Whether alcohol improves Already in a foreign language? Do lizards from West Africa have the preferred pizza? Can painting cows with zebra strips facilitate repel biting flies? These and other unusual research questions were honored tonight during the virtual ceremony of the announcement of 2025 winners of the annual Nobel IG Awards. Yes, this is the time of year again, when earnest and stupid converge – learning.
Founded in 1991, IG Nobels Good -natured parody Nobel Prizes; They respect “the achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” Incognly the Campia Awards, the ceremony contains miniature operas, scientific demo and 24/7 lectures, in which experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words.
Acceptance speeches are confined to 60 seconds. And as the motto suggests, honored research may at first glance seem comical, but that does not mean that it is deprived of scientific merit. In weeks after the ceremony, the winners will also have free public talks, which will be published on the Imprawable Research website.
Without unnecessary ado, here are the winners of the Nobel IG Awards in 2025.
Biology
Photo: Tomoki WHO et al., 2019
Quote: Tomoki Kojima, Kazato Oishi, Yasushi Matsubara, Yuki Uchiyama, Yoshihiko Fukushima, Nota Aoki, Sato, Tatsuaki Masuda, Junichu Ueda, Hiroyuki Hiraoka and Katsutoshi Kino, to their experiments To find out if cows painted with zebra -like stripes can avoid biting by flies.
Every dairy farmer can say that biting flies are an undebuled scourge for cattle, so often he sees cows throwing heads, stamping the feet, padded in the tail and vibrating the skin – in a way that tries to shake off nasty creatures. There is also economic costs, because it causes cattle to have smaller belts and fed, burn for shorter times and begins to connect together, which increases thermal stress and the risk of animal damage. This causes less milk milk efficiency and less profitability of fed beef.
Do you know who doesn’t bother biting flies? Ribs. Scientists have long debated the characteristic function of the black and white zebra pattern. Is it for camouflage? Misleading potential predators? Or maybe pushing these unbearable flies? Tomoki Kojima et al. He decided to test the last hypothesis, painting zebra strips on six pregnant Japanese black cows at Aichi Agricultural Research Center in Japan. They used varnishes transferred by water, which were washed away after a few days so that the cows could change in three different groups: zebra strips, only black stripes or no stripes (as a control).