Does painting cows with stripes prevent fly bites? Researchers who studied this wins Ig Nobel prize

BOSTON (AP) — A team of researchers from Japan wondered if painting cows with zebra-like stripes would prevent flies from biting them. Another group from Africa and Europe pondered the types of pizza lizards preferred to eat.

Those researchers were honored Thursday in Boston with an Ig Nobel, the prize for comical scientific achievement.

“When I did this experiment, I hoped that I would win the Ig Nobel. It’s my dream. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable,” said Tomoki Kojima, whose team put tape on Japanese beef cows and then spray painted them with white stripes. As a result, fewer flies were attracted to the cows and they seemed less bothered by the flies.

Despite the findings, Kojima admitted it might be a challenge to apply this approach on a large-scale.

The year’s winners, honored in 10 categories, also include a group from Europe that found drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak a foreign language and a researcher who studied fingernail growth for decades.

“Every great discovery ever, at first glance seemed screwy and laughable,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, said in an e-mail interview ahead of the awards ceremony. “The same is true of every worthless discovery. The Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate ALL these discoveries, because at the very first glance, who really knows?”

The 35th annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony is organized by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights research that makes people laugh and then think. It’s usually held weeks before the actual Nobel Prizes are announced.

A ceremony to celebrate the winners was planned for Thursday night at Boston University where winners were expected to be pelted with paper airplanes and feted by actual Nobel laureates including Esther Duflo and Eric Maskin. Duflo won the Nobel Prize for her experimental approach to alleviating global poverty and Maskin for laying the foundations of mechanism design theory.

A mini-opera about gastroenterologists and their patients, inspired by this year’s theme which is digestion, was also planned.

Other winners this year included a group from India which studied whether foul-smelling shoes influenced someone’s experience using a shoe rack and researchers from the United States and Israel who explored whether eating Teflon is a good way to increase food volume. There was an award for a dead researcher who spent 35 years studying fingernail growth and a winning study from a team of international scientists that looked at whether giving alcohol to bats impaired their ability to fly.

“It’s a great honor for us,” said Francisco Sanchez, one of the researchers from Colombia who studied the drunken bats. “It’s really good. You can see that scientists are not really square and super serious and can have some fun while showing interesting science.”

Sanchez said their research found that the bats weren’t fans of rotten fruit, which often has higher concentrations of alcohol. Maybe for good reason. When they were forced to eat it, their flying and echolocation suffered, he said.

“They actually got drunk similar to what happens to us,” Sanchez said. “When you take some ethanol, you move slower and your speech is impaired.”