Dr Michelle Dickinson: nanotechnologist on her top three Ig Nobel award nominees

The 2025 Ig Nobel awards have been revealed, with drunk bats, pizza-eating lizards and painted-up zebra cows among this year's nominees. Dr Michelle Dickinson's gone through the nominees - and outlined her top three. Does painting a cow to look like a zebra mean it's bitten less by flies?    Scientists have long wondered why zebras are not bitten by flies as much as other animals. Researchers who were looking into how to prevent cows from being bitten by flies decided to test if had something to do with the stripes, so they painted cows with black and white stripes and measured how many bites they had, and lo and behold the striped cows had half the number of bites than the non-painted cows did! Does eating garlic when breastfeeding change the smell of your breastmilk?  Garlic is known to have a very potent odour - but it's also delicious, and so scientists wanted to know if the odour could be passed on to breastmilk and if it bothered the babies who were drinking the milk. Breastfeeding mothers were either given garlic capsules or asked to eat a sulphurous-free diet (emitting garlic, onion and asparagus) and their breastmilk was then sniffed by adults to see if they could detect any difference between them. The milk from the garlic consuming mothers was reported to have a much more intense odour which peaked at 2 hours after ingestion. Interestingly, it seems that the garlicky-smelling milk was actually more desirable and babies who were fed after their mothers ate garlic not only breastfed for longer, but consumed more milk!  Are you more fluent in a second language if you are drunk?  Alcohol is known to have detrimental effects on memory and inhibitory control, but there has been a belief among bilingual people that their foreign language fluency improves after a few drinks. To test this, 50 native German speakers who also spoke Dutch were tested with one group receiving a vodka and bitter lemon drink and the other group just water.  After they were asked to rate their own self-perception of their skill in Dutch and the Dutch speakers they were talking to were also asked to rate them.   The results showed that intoxication did actually improve the Dutch fluency of the participants according to the sober Dutch speakers.  LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.