The 2025 Ig Nobels, Part 2

we like to talk about. The Ignobels are given out usually in September of each year by a scientific humor journal called the Annals of Improbable Research, edited for many years by Mark Abrahams, and the state admission of the Ignobel Prizes is to honor achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think. If you haven't listened to part one yet, you can go back and check

that one out first. But for a brief recap. In the last episode, we talked about the twenty two twenty five prize in nutrition, which went to a team who studied lizards eating pizza. The prize for psychology for a paper that looked at whether people become more narcissistic when you tell them that they're really smart. And the twenty twenty five Prize for Aviation, which went to a study on whether fruit bats become worse at flying when they get drunk. Is that about right, Rob, Yes, and they do.

And we're back today to talk about more.

that they've covered over the years. A rarity in today's web space.

As always, apologies for any mispronunciations, but the team was Tomoki Kojima, Kazato Oishi, Yasushi Matsubara, Yuki Uchiyama, Yoshihiko Fukushima, Naoto Aoki, say Sato, Tatsuaki Masuda, Junichi Yueida, hiro Yuki Hiruka, and Katsutoshi Kino, and then to quote the prize language for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra like striping can avoid being bitten by flies? Yes, that

said painted. So the question is can you keep parasitic insects off your cows by just painting some zebra stripes on them? The paper in question was published in twenty nineteen in the journal plus one, and it was called Cows painted with zebra like striping can avoid biting fly attacks.

It kind of gives away the result there. But the funny thing about this study is that this is actually not the first time, not this paper in particular, but research on this general subject has come up on the show. We talked about this in a listener Mail episode last year, which was was from August twenty twenty four. Rob, Was this an episode that I did solo or were you on this episode with me?

with black and white zebra print. Which is funny already because I think, not knowing the reason for this, a lot of people's first assumption might be that this is just a horse somebody has dressed up in a zebra costume for esthetic reasons, maybe Halloween unclear.

this kind of product. So fly sheets are lightweight bankets, usually made out of some kind of mesh fabric that you drape over a horse to keep flies and other insects from biting the horse. And if you google these products, you'll find that other uses are advertised as well, like protecting animals from UV radiation. From what I'm reading, these

things work pretty well at their main job. But that doesn't mean that you can just protect all your horses permanently by dressing them in fly sheets and then just leaving them on all the time. Apparently, some horses do not like the sheets. They find them irritating and they try to shake them or rub them off, which could lead to injury. Also, there is some injury risk just from the horse knocking it part way off and then

getting it tangled on something. And also you can't leave it on forever for the same reason that you shouldn't leave the same piece of human clothing on forever. Eventually it gets dirty and damp and hot, and it irritates the skin, possibly leading to overheating or to skin infections. So fly sheets can protect your horse from fly bites to some extent, but you've got to balance the pros and cons, and even for horses that tolerate them, well, it's not just a putg it on once and forget

about it solution. But the thing I wondered about in this image was if the fly sheet is itself a physical barrier against fly bytes, what would be the additional benefit, if anything, of having an insect repelling pattern printed on the fly sheet? If that is indeed what zebra stripes even do. We'll explore that question more in a minute.

But wouldn't the sheet itself provide the protection whether it was printed with zebra stripes or leopard print or you know whatever individual frames from the Boxer's omen just like the whole movie on the side of the horse. Maybe maybe there is an additional benefit, but I'm skeptical.

as the Ignobel Prize winning study here. That paper was called Benefits of Zebra stripes Behavior of Tabinid flies around zebras and horses. That was by Caro at All short summary of that one. Over the years, researchers have proposed a lot of different evolutionary reasons that zebras might have stripes.

Maybe the stripes somehow regulate body temperature, for example, maybe they helped the zebra avoid overheating in the sun somehow, maybe they are a type of visual camouflage confusing predators. But a very promising idea is that somehow the stripes protect zebras against ectoparasitic insects like biting flies quote quoting the authors. Here, we examined the behavior of tabanids, horseflies in the vicinity of captive planes, zebras, and uniformly colored

domestic horses living on a horse farm in Britain. Observations showed that fewer tabanids landed on zebras than on horses per unit time, although rates of tabanids circling around or briefly touching zebra and horse pillage did not differ. So interesting finding. The horses and zebra has had equal numbers of flies swarming around them, but the flies successfully landed on the zebras less often, which presumably means they were

able to bite the zebras less often. And in a secondary experiment, the authors found that if you placed a zebra patterned coat on a horse compared to coats of solid white or solid black, it reduced the number of tabinid flies that landed on the horse. The horseflies still landed on and bit like exposed unpatterned parts of the horse's bodies, like the head. So the question is if zebra stripes prevent flies or help help reduce the amount that flies land on you, how do they do that?

The author's right quote. In separate detailed video analyzes, tabanids approached zebras faster and failed to decelerate before contacting zebras, and proportionately more tabinids simply touched rather than landed on

zebra pelage in comparison to horses. So, according to this other research, when you have zebra stripes, biting flies have a harder time slowing down their flight and landing correctly on your skin, and they're more likely to kind of fly into you at higher speed and bounce off without landing. That's kind of interesting. It's like putting some kind of dazzle your on your airport runway. You know, it makes it hard to land the plane.

settled issue. But that brings us to the Ignobel prize winning paper on this topic. Again, that's the Kojima at All paper from twenty nineteen. To summarize this one, the authors cite the previous research showing that zebra stripes seem to reduce attacks by biting flies, and however much this is or is not really a major fitness concern for zebras in the wild, the authors argued that it is of major significance to people who raise domestic animals like cattle.

They write, quote, biting flies are serious pests of livestock that cause economic losses in animal production. Now you might think, like, how do fly bytes cause those losses. Well, they actually explain. They say, cattle find these biting flies really annoying, and they change their behavior to try to protect themselves from

fly bites. So cattle that are bothered by biting flies spend less time feeding and grazing, they spend less time bedding down, and they also engage in direct defensive behaviors. These defensive behaviors can involve a lot of violent body movements, maybe flicking the tail, stomping around, shaking their heads, and twitching the muscles on the skin. Cattle will also crowd their bodies together to decrease their surface area and protect

themselves from flies. And the authors argue that all of these behaviors cause economic losses since the cattle expend energy doing this stuff, they eat and they rest less, and crowding or bunching together in particular, seems bad. Quote. Bunching increases heat, stress and risk of injury as animals jostle for a better position to avoid biting flies, and this can reduce weight gains in feed lot beef cattle and

milk yield in dairy cows. So this doesn't necessarily prove it, but I think it's a reasonable inference that if if biting flies cause these measurable economic losses for domestic cattle owners, they might well translate to similar evolutionary losses for animals in nature. We don't know for sure, but it seems quite possible.

look at. Here. So this is a black cow that has been painted with white zebra stripes on the sides, like the flanks, not the head, but everywhere except the head, the flanks and the legs going all the way to the rear end.

So the authors they described their small experiment as follows quote. Six Japanese black cows were assigned to treatments using a three by three Latin square design. The treatments were black and white painted stripes, black painted stripes and no stripes, meaning an all black body surface. Recorded fly repelling behaviors were head throw, ear beat, leg stamp, skin twitch, and

tail flick. Photo images of the right side of each cow were taken using a commercial digital camera after every observation, and biting flies on the body and each leg were counted from the photo images. Okay, so maybe that's why it's important to know exactly where the boundaries are here. We showed that the numbers of biting flies on Japanese black cows painted with black and white stripes were significantly lower than those on non painted cows and cows painted

only with black stripes. The frequencies of fly repelling behaviors in cows painted with black and white stripes were also lower than those in the non painted and black striped cows. So again, in other words, compared to cows without stripes and black cows painted with blacks, black cows painted with black and white stripes had fewer biting flies land on them and also showed fewer fly repelling behaviors, all the

different kinds of you know, the shoe fly dance. The authors say that based on these results, it may be the case that painting zebra stripes on solid colored livestock can reduce the burden from biting flies without resorting to other interventions like applying pesticides to livestock, which can also be effective, but that comes with downside such as contributing to long term pesticide resistance in the environment.

and also in aerospace parts. So the funny part here is, obviously the authors are suggesting a brand new use for PTFE, and that is what if we ate it as a food additive.

The first step toward achieving this goal is the ability to increase the volume of food without adding calories, the final frontier, if you will, of eating zero calorie polymers.

Reading this study reminded me of a gag on thirty Rock where Jenna is on a diet and she says it's the Japanese paper diet, where she says I can only eat paper, but I can eat all the paper I want. Perfect Yeah, I mean to be clear, the idea of eating paper as a diet. Yeah, eating paper I think would technically net you zero calories because your digestive system can't break down the cellulose, the main component

of paper or most paper anyway. But this is not recommended as it's not good for your digestion, and that's before you even consider potential chemical additives, and also the ink that may be on the paper. Though there are edible wrappings and even mediums for printing, I'm not sure you could really make a diet out of those either. But yeah, just the idea of eating paper for your diet. It works for a joke, I don't think it would work in real life. So back to consuming non flavored

ptfes as part of your diet. To be fair, the proposal is a little more complicated than Hey, it has zero calories, so why don't we eat it? First of all, the general proposal is that it would be some sort of additive again, perhaps like a smoothie powder to bulk up actual food. You'd eat this food, but then a percentage of the food volume would be indigestible. It cannot be metabolized, so it just passes through, taking up space, giving you the feeling of being full without itself metabolizing.

The rest of your meal would though. According to the paper, they present this as a quote non metabolized food volume bulking agent, and they charge that indeed PTFE is ideal for this because it's quote widely considered to be the most inert material known and is extremely stable. They also add that it succeeds in being quote inert safe, resistant to stomach acid, lax taste, available in powder form, smooth, resistant to heat, and also cost effective.

within the body, something terrible has gone wrong. And just speaking to the idea of PTF he's heating up in the body, not to any other potential health ramifications here, which again I think this obviously raises a ton of questions that are not necessarily addressed in this paper or would need to be addressed in follow up papers if there was like really a huge drive to get ptfees deliberately into food. But you know, that doesn't stop them

from presenting some evidence. They point to some studies that claim that, and they claim that quote animal feeding trials showed that rats fed a diet of twenty five percent PTFE for ninety days had no signs of toxicity and that the rats lost weight. And then they go on to suggest a possible human consumption ratio of three parts food to one part PTFE by volume, and again their idea is this would be for therapeutic use in weight loss.

But I just want to really stress here that this is absolutely not something that anyone out there should now go out and line up for themselves. Don't try and cook this up for yourself either. Don't develop your own diet based on hearing about this study. This particular idea doesn't seem to be picking up a lot of steam.

certainly vowed concerns. But should we necessarily be looking for all new reasons to produce these chemicals and to intentionally ingest them.

to do? But then again, I mean that's kind of the beautiful thing about science, right, is sometimes you do explore these big sort of what ifs, what is this a potential solution? And you know, maybe one paper leans a little more positive and if it's necessary for follow up, there will be some more negative considerations as well.

da Vida Ravignez, and Vincenzo Maria Schimenti. Four quote discoveries about the physics of pasta sauce, especially the phase transition that can lead to clumping, which can be a cause of unpleasantness. The vapor in question was called phase behavior of Cachiae pep bee sauce, published in the journal Physics of Fluids in twenty twenty five. So a very recent one.

a sentence, any other noun. Instead substitute cheese, they will lose their minds. It's amazing.

the real witchfinders general. Of like traditional pasta technique, I think my renditions of it are all blasphemous in one way or another, because sometimes I add another source of fat, like butter or olive oil, like so you make it with black pepper in it, and I like toasting some of the black pepper and olive oil. I think that's nice. Sometimes I have used a mixture of cheeses in it, or I have used parmesano reggiano instead of pecorino romano.

I think all of these things are not technically cachaae pepe certainly not the traditional version, but some variation on the theme.

I don't know, but they're absolutely necessary. You need those as well. Anyway. You might think, based on the fact that there are only three ingredients, that this would be a very easy dish to make, but as the authors of this paper point out, classic catchaway peppe is notoriously difficult to get just right, especially for beginners who haven't made it a million times and gotten this intuitive feel

for it. The really difficult part to do perfectly is achieving the right sauce consistency, which I would also argue is the most difficult part of you know, from like what you brought up American recipes like macaroni and cheese. You know, the hardest part to get right is just the right smoothness of the sauce in the finished product.

hard cheese made from sheep's milk. You boil pasta in slightly salted water, and while the pasta boils, some starch will leach out from the pasta and that gets gelatinized in the cooking water. This is true anytime you make pasta, and you reserve at least some of this starchy pasta water to help build your cheese sauce. Of course, outside of Cachawa peppe, starchy pasta water is an important ingredient in building many pasta sauces and just generally in finishing

pasta dishes. So you to finish the dish, you melt your grated pecorian omano cheese in some of the starchy cooking water while mixing it up with the pasta. And this is where a lot of things can go wrong. If it is too hot, your cheese will not melt smoothly and it will form these unappetizing lumps, the broken cheese sauce thing where it's like got these rubbery little protein clumps in it. If it's not hot enough, your cheese will not melt fully into the water and it

will not form a sauce. If there is not enough starch in your pasta cooking water, the melted cheese will not emulsify, and once again you get the rubbery little protein clumps. If there is too much starch, the sauce loses its sauciness and it becomes stiff and unappetizing in a different way. It's not really saucy. It's more kind of like a meala or something.

because you salted your cooking water. But more importantly, it has starch from the pasta in it, which means it's a little bit thicker than normal water. It has this thickness and emulsifying capability that starchy water does.

fats separate. And this is why if you like melt a piece of cheese in the microwave, you can create an oily grease slick. The proteins and the fats that are in you know, when the cheese is not melted, they're all mixed together. When you melt it, this the fat separates and it forms this oil slick. And so this is the fat content separating from the protein matrix.

When cheese is melted in a liquid like water, this gross clumping can happen because the protein matrix, and this is going to be mainly the protein casin in a dairy base, you know, in things like cheese, the proteins, all the casin proteins, come apart from their matrix and then the loose proteins begin to bond to each other and form these rubbery globs of protein. Also in this process. Of course, the fat leaks out, it gets squeezed out as the proteins you know, clump together, and it goes

its own way. If it's in water, this will mean floating and pooling on the top of the water. This is what you don't want to happen to your cheese sauce. This is a broken sauce. So when you add starch to boiling water, the starch gelatinizes and it thickens the water, making it more viscous than just water on its own. The thickness of the starchy water prevents the proteins and fat in melting cheese each from aggregating and sticking to themselves.

So you end up with a smoother sauce with the fat and the protein distributed more evenly throughout, instead of rubbery casin clumps where all the proteins are sticking together and a grease slick floating on top where all the fat is separate and sticking to itself. But the way I describe this here is like it is order of operation sensitive. This is why you can't save an already broken sauce by adding starch. Once the damage is done, the starch is not gonna fix it. Starch only protects,

it does not repair. Also, the presence of starch can only protect the cheese so much. Even in starchy water. If you overheat the cheese, it will still be torn asunder and the fats in proteins will separate. So starch provides some heat protection, but not invincibility to heat. And this is why the heat in making the cheese sauces is so important. If you get it too hot, it's gonna clump up and split no matter what you do.

you need. But what if you don't have that feel? Well, the authors of this paper examine the whole process in a much more granular and quantitative way, and they come up with like specific numerical and chemical recommendations to help people achieve perfect catchioy pepe if they don't know what they're doing quote. We identify starch concentration as the key

factor influencing sauce stability with direct implications for practical cooking. Specifically, we delineate a regime where starch concentrations below one percent relative to cheese maas lead to the formation of system wide clumps, a condition determining what we term the mozzarella phase. That's a bad thing. You don't want your cheese sauce to turn into mozzarella clumps and corresponding to an unpleasant

and separated sauce. Additionally, we examine the impact of cheese concentration relative to water at a fixed starch level, observing a lower critical solution temperature that we theoretically rationalized by means of a minimal effective free energy model. We further analyze the effect of a less traditional stabilizer tri sodium citrate, and observe a sharp transition from the mozzarella phase to a completely smooth and stable sauce in contrast to starch

stabilized mixtures where the transition is more gradual. Finally, we present a scientifically optimized recipe based on our findings, enabling a consistently flawless execution of this classic dish. So they've got a fool proof method. Now I want to add that they talk about the alternate method, where instead of starts,

you go with tri sodium citrate. I think a lot of Italian cooking purists would rebel at the idea of using sodium citrate to emulsify their cheese sauce, but in the world of industrial food products, this is one of the most used additives to ensure a stable emulsion and to prevent sauces from splitting. Tri sodium citrate is one of the key ingredients in cheese products that are made

explicitly for melting, things like Velveta and American cheese. Why do they stay so creamy and not split when they melt is because they have tri sodium citrate, this emulsifying agent, which works in part, by the way, by helping prevent the casin proteins from bonding together in the first place, so that it like chemically sort of prevents them from clumping.

If the starch content is less than one percent of the cheese weight, the sauce is prone to separating into unpleasant system sized clumps, corresponding to the mod cyrilla phase and Figures one and two. On the other hand, exceeding four percent of starch results in a sauce that becomes

stiff and unappetizing as it cools. Rob This is it's kind of hard to describe this if I don't know if you've ever made an over starched pasta, but it starts to become not really saucy and more like it's kind of held together by a glue, sort of an unpleasant gluy texture in between the.

and then four that two hundred grams of cheese. You would want five grams of starch in about fifty grams of water, so you could use a starch like five grams of corn starch or potato starch dissolved in fifty grams of water. Traditionally, you get the right amount of starch here by using feel and by using the pasta cooking water, sometimes concentrating the starch content by boiling it down a little bit extra so you concentrate it. This

is called resotata. But this still requires some guesswork. You just got to like kind of look at it and know what you're looking for, because obviously you can't practically measure the starch content of the water once it's already dissolved. So they say, if you're really looking for an easy shortcut, you just make your sauce by dissolving five grams of corn starch or potato starch and fifty grams of water, heating it gently until it gelatinizes, then melting the cheese

into this mixture to make your sauce. I again, I don't know if the pasta witch finder would approve, but that's what they say.

rack Redesign. From the proceedings of the HWWE. I'm to understand this is the Annual Conference of Indian of the Indian Society of Ergonomics from and this was a twenty seventeen presentation. So on the surface, yes, this paper is funny because it is about smelly shoes, which this is always going to be a funny concept so long as you're not around the smelly shoes in question. Smelly shoes become less funny if you were wearing them, or you're having to put up with someone in else's smelly shoes.

The Durian fruit pretty strong smells involved there. But I think sometimes if one approaches if you approach the Durian expecting a cheese, thinking of it as kind of a cheese as fruit or a fruit as cheese, whichever way it goes, then it makes a lot more sense.

in their design. You can't necessarily throw them in the washer, and then you can't really throw them in the dryer either, because you know it'll clog up and make that awful racket and potentially destroy your dryer. So, yeah, we don't always give the shoe our shoes the same attention we give our bodies in our clothing.

about you know, shoes off homes in India. I'm also to understand religious spaces and certain shops and restaurants you know, may also have these expectations in place, while larger Western nine space western nized spaces are not going to have that. I'd be interested to hear from folks out there who are in India or have been to India. I've never been, but I have visited countries where there's certainly more of a custom of shoe removal, and and that's also the

way we do it in our house. We're generally a shoes off household. And I really loved going to Japan, where there's a lot of shoes off and pretty much everywhere has a shoehorn handy, and that spoiled me. Once I came back, It's like, why are there not shoehorns everywhere? So now I have like one by the door that I use, and I'm a little bit offended anywhere I go that doesn't have a shoehorn.

for the shoe rack. And once we're into talking about the design of an item, we're potentially talking about ergonomics, we're talking about human efficiency and design, and they point out that generally when we're talking about this, we're talking about like the physical aspects of the device or a

device or structure. You know, there are so many different ways to approach ergonomics, and you know, we've all had some experience with ergonomic design or a lack of ergonomic design, with everything from like a computer mouse to a doorframe. Right like, we be designing things that meet us at least halfway, and we that are that don't force us to become less human in order to interact with them.

So fair enough, But then they point out that, Okay, we tend to focus on the physicality of all this, but we don't think about things like scent, and they say that we should, and that concerns the shoe rack. What can we be doing about the design of a shoe rack, the kind of shoe rack that would be in the immediate interior of one's home or just outside one's door, or however it is arranged. What could we do with the design here to make shoes less pungent?

and only mildly funny. But what I found really hilarious was the chart on their experimentation with the UV lighting on the shoe rack. And to be clear, I'm not making fun of the research or the researchers here, but just the mental imagery of this legitimate experiment makes me giggle. So I included the table here for you Joe's Table two. Exposure time of UVC tube light and odor observed. And so we get we get exposure in minutes from zero

minutes to fifteen minutes. And then we also have the foulness of the shoe smell rated as well, and then the smell doe to UV treatment.

smell and just a mild burnt rubber smell. Okay, And from here this is where the burnt rubber smell cranks up, because the next exposure thresholds are four minutes, six minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, and then the foul smell from the shoes remains zero throughout, but the smell due to the UV treatment increases, so eventually you're getting to a fifteen minute exposure zero foul smell from the shoes, but

a four rating for smell due to UV treatment. And then they add very strong burnt rubber smell shoe hot ins extreme In this experiment, they found yes, if you if you cook the shoes too much, they will no longer smell a foot funk, but they will be hot shoes that smell like burning rubber.

Too little attention and you have a stinky situation. Too much attention and you have a different but even more stinky situation. So you have to find that perfect balance between the two. Bravo to the authors, absolutely, all right.

after they occur. Other times we come back after on Cober and cover them a little late after things have cooled off a little bit because, as is often the case, the studies that are honored, they often get a lot of additional circulation and say like the late night comedy press and so forth. All right, as always, will remind

everyone out there that Stuff to Blow your Mind. It's primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.