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. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudgin
from News Talks EDB.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Just love this time of year. It is time for
the Ignoble Awards again. These awards are kind of like
satirical awards given to scientific studies that might make you laugh,
but then they might also make you think they might
have a point to them. Doctor Michelle Dickinson has done
had the very tough job of trying to pick three
of her favorites.

Speaker 3 (00:31):
It's so hard because I love them all, and I
love this time of year because it also brings, you know,
good scientific research sort to the forefront and you go, oh,
somebody was paid to study that. So here are my
top three favorites, and we're going to start with them.
I don't know why they did this. So the question
is does painting a cow with zebra stripes mean that

(00:52):
it is bitten by less flies? So it says that
zebra seem to be bitten by less flies than other
mammals like horses. Is it the stripes in these Japanese research,
I don't know. Let's take our black cows and paint them.
So they took cows that are normally black these are actually
very prized Wagou cows. And they took two of the

(01:13):
cows and they put white stripes on them, painted white stripes.
They took two of the cows and they painted black
stripes on them. So they just stayed black. But they
want to see if the paint made a difference.

Speaker 4 (01:22):
Oh yeah, good point.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
And then they just left thorough scientific wou here and
just left two cows in the field unpainted, And then
they literally watched them all day encountered how many flies
landed on each cow and how often the cow showed
some sort of irritation behavior. So usually if a fly
lands on a cow, they'll like flick their tail or

(01:44):
they'll shake their head. So how many times these poor
scientists just stared at the cows and were like, how
many tail flicks? How many flies are landing?

Speaker 4 (01:50):
All of this? But it is true.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
So the cows that were painted to look like zebras
had half the number of flies landing on them and
were much less irritated by flies than the other ones.
So it seems that it is true. Zebra stripes does
mean that flies don't land at you, and there's some
research around they think it might be the visual contrast
affects the fli's ability to land. But this is important

(02:14):
for wagoo beef because wago beef is very tender and
if the fly is if the cow is not flicking
all the time, it is less stressed. It is a
more chilled cow, and apparently that means the meat taste better.
So there you got the curl. Okay. Number two Garlic
is if you eat garlic if you are breastfeeding, does

(02:35):
it change the taste of the smell of your breast milk?
Does that matter to your baby?

Speaker 4 (02:40):
Did a man come up with the sun?

Speaker 3 (02:42):
But it's so good. So we know that garlic is stinky.
It's got a very potent odor, but we also know
it's delicious. And it's also what's called a garalacta garg
which means that it promotes or increases breast milk supplies.
So if you are breastfeeding, usually we eat oats, but
some people eat garlic, especially in India, to help promote that.
So can that odor of you eating garlic bee pasted

(03:03):
your breast milk? Under the baby's mind, this is cool?
So they breastfeeding mothers garlic powder pills, some of them
and some of them had to have a sulfurous feed diet,
so no garlic, no onion, no asparagus, basically nothing stinky.
And then they had to express this breast milk and
then they gave it to adults to sniff.

Speaker 4 (03:21):
She's adults to.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
Sniff this breast milk and go, does one stink more
than the other, And they were like, oh yeah. They
were able to easily identify the milk of those who
had had the garlic in their diet. They were like,
oh no, this is it's definitely garlicy milk. And then
they went, we'll do the babies get so then they
measured how the babies suckled, and they found that the
garlic in the breast milk smelt the most potent two

(03:44):
hours after ingestion, and apparently the babies loved it more
so babies. They measured them the babies milk and baby
breastfeeding for and how much milk they consumed. Those who
had smelt the garlic actually consumed more and breast fed
for longer. So apparently this is weird. Babies love garlic
milk and we'll consume more, which is the opposite of

(04:05):
what I know. I know, I'm not sure what to
take from there, but don't worry about garlic and your diet.
If you're bastfeeding, Apparently your babies are gonna love it.

Speaker 4 (04:12):
So there you go right now. If you've been on
your way at some point speaking a foreign language, this
one might be of interest to you. Smirk, ring a bell.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
People who are bilingual believe that the more drunk they get,
the more fluent they are in their second language. You know,
most of us know that when we get drunk, we
think we're more everything about our skills are actually there. So
what they did is they took fifty native German speakers,
and these speakers also spoke Dutch as their second language,
and they basically just applied them with vodka. Half of

(04:43):
them got vodka, half of them got water, and then
they had to talk to native Dutch speakers. And it's
true the drunk people did speak Dutch, if we go
according to the Dutch speakers they were speaking to. So yeah,
and you want to get ahead, just take a few
drinks and you're doing much better.

Speaker 4 (05:00):
Michelle has always really appreciated if you want to find
all the winners, you can find that at improbable dot
com and just look for egg winners there. Thank you
so much. We'll see you next week.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
For more from the Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks A B from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio