**Pizza-loving lizards to alcoholic bats: Bizarre research wins Ig Nobel**
*By Akash Pandey | Sep 19, 2025, 05:21 PM*
The 35th annual Ig Nobel Prize awards, a celebration of bizarre yet thought-provoking scientific achievements, took place recently at Boston University. The event was also streamed online, allowing a global audience to join in the fun. This year’s ceremony centered around the theme of **digestion**, featuring intriguing talks and unique performances.
One highlight was a presentation by Dr. Trisha Pasricha, who explored the curious connection between smartphone use on toilets and the incidence of hemorrhoids. Additionally, attendees enjoyed a mini-opera titled *“The Plight of the Gastroenterologist,”* adding an artistic touch to the scientific festivities.
### Unusual Research Topics Recognized
The Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded by actual Nobel laureates, honored a variety of unconventional studies that blend curiosity with humor. Some of the standout topics included painting cows with zebra stripes to reduce fly bites and investigating pizza preferences among different lizard species.
Among the notable winners were William B. Bean, who received a posthumous award for meticulously documenting the growth of his fingernail over 35 years. Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp were recognized for their research on how garlic consumption affects nursing babies. Meanwhile, Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles Gignac studied how narcissists react when told they are intelligent, revealing quirky insights into human psychology.
### Innovative Chemistry and Engineering Research
The awards also celebrated groundbreaking work in chemistry and engineering. Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich, and Frank Greenway won the chemistry prize for their unusual study on eating Teflon to increase food volume without adding calories—an idea sure to spark both laughter and curiosity.
In the field of engineering design, Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal examined how foul-smelling shoes influence the experience of using a shoe rack, blending everyday annoyances with scientific investigation.
The physics prize was awarded to a team that analyzed the clumping behavior of pasta sauce, a seemingly trivial phenomenon with surprisingly complex underlying principles.
Carly York, an associate professor of biology at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina, commented on the event’s overall impact: these winners perfectly fulfill the Ig Nobel’s mission—to make people laugh and then think.
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The Ig Nobel Prizes continue to celebrate the weird and wonderful side of science, proving that curiosity knows no bounds and that humor can be a powerful tool for learning.
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