Physics applied to study exotic materials in industries helps cook perfect pasta sauce

Research into cooking the perfect pasta sauce, another probing the types of pizza lizards liked to eat, and a study wondering whether painting cows with stripes protected them from flies are among the winners of the 2025 Ig Nobel prize, awarded for comical scientific achievement.

The Ig Nobel prizes, given every September, honour quirky scientific achievements that first "make people laugh, then think".

It is organised annually by the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research, and this year's winners were awarded the prize at a ceremony held at Boston University on Thursday.

In the physics category, this year's winner was an international team of researchers from Austria, Italy, Germany and Spain who cracked the mystery of crafting the perfect cacio e pepe pasta - an iconic Italian dish celebrated for its simplicity, but has long eluded even the most seasoned cooks.

The team was awarded the Ig Nobel prize for their "breakthrough" in decoding the elusive science behind the creamy perfection of cacio e pepe sauce by applying physics usually used to study exotic materials and industrial processes.

The key challenge in crafting the perfect cacio e pepe pasta sauce is producing a stable emulsion between Pecorino Romano cheese and pasta water infused with starch, all without the sauce breaking down into unappetising clumps.

Scientists followed a methodical cooking approach, applying parallels seen in the biotechnology study of protein aggregation to make the perfect pasta sauce.

Another team from Japan was awarded the Nobel Prize parody for finding that Japanese beef cows spray-painted with white stripes attracted fewer flies.

"When I did this experiment, I hoped that I would win the Ig Nobel. It's my dream. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable," Tomoki Kojima, who led the research, told Associated Press.

Overall, studies from 10 categories were awarded the Ig Nobel this year, including research which found drinking alcohol could sometimes improve a person's ability to speak a foreign language, and another probing fingernail growth for decades.

The prize in the "nutrition" category was awarded to a group for studying "the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza".

This study, published in the African Journal of Ecology, found that rainbow lizards preferred the "four-cheese pizza".

Initially, scientists sought to understand why these lizards were adept at urban life, and found that pizzas were part of the answer in some areas.

"In a seaside resort in Togo, we observed the incredible behaviour of them 'stealing' pizza from tourists," ecologist Luca Luiselli said.

But when the four-cheese pizza was made available, several lizards joined in, [even coming from] many metres away or descending from trees," Dr Luiselli told ABC News.

The chemistry prize was awarded to researchers who investigated whether eating powdered Teflon (PTFE) - the chemical coating of non-stick pans - could be used to boost food volume and satiety without adding extra calories.

"Satiety can be achieved without increasing the calories of food by mixing food with a material that cannot be metabolised...Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) is an ideal substance for this purpose. It is a soft plastic that is widely considered to be the most inert material known and is extremely stable," researchers wrote in their study.

"Animal feeding trials showed that rats fed a diet of 25 per cent PTFE for 90 days had no signs of toxicity and that the rats lost weight," they wrote in the research published in the journal Obesity Technology.

Another group of scientists won the Ig Nobel 2025 prize in the "aviation" category for their work on the effects of alcohol consumption on bats' ability to fly and navigate.

A team from India also won the prize this year for studying whether foul-smelling shoes influenced someone's experience using a shoe rack.

The winners were celebrated at the ceremony in Boston in the usual Ig Nobel fashion by an audience who pelted them with paper aeroplanes.

Science behind pasta sauce, pizza-eating lizards, drunk bats win 2025 Ig Nobel